The Eugenicist Who Defended Eugenics' Victims
In 1942, Foster Kennedy stood before the American Journal of Psychiatry and said something that still makes you do a double-take. Kennedy was no civil-rights crusader — he was, by every account, an earnest eugenicist. He argued that children born with what he called "nature's mistakes" should be euthanized. Sound monstrous? It is.
But then he pivoted, and this is where the story gets interesting. He turned around and pleaded for one group to be spared: people with what we now call bipolar disorder. Reducing their numbers, he warned, would be "a disaster, producing a population of...mediocrities, capable of pushing but not of leaping."
Think about that for a second. A man who wanted to eliminate human genetic diversity was the one arguing we should keep it — specifically, the diversity that looks like mania and depression cycling through families. He saw something most eugenicists missed: the traits we label as defects often underwrite the very leaps that move civilization forward. Lincoln's melancholy. van Gogh's turbulence. Maybe even Einstein's social awkwardness.
Kennedy was wrong about almost everything he stood for. But on this one point, he was right in a way that matters more now than it did eighty years ago.
How CRISPR Actually Works — And Why It's Already Here
CRISPR uses an RNA molecule as a guide and an enzyme called Cas9 to snip DNA at precise locations. Think of it like molecular scissors with a GPS. You tell it where to cut, and it cuts. The technology was developed in 2012, and my mother died shortly after — she never got to see what her genetic determinism would have made of it.
Here's the thing that catches most people off guard: this isn't science fiction anymore. It's legal in the United States, and it's happening right now through embryo profiling services. Nucleus Genomics runs pickyourbaby.com with the tagline "Have Your Best Baby." For a steep price, they'll give IVF parents a genetic profile of their embryos — height, eye color, intelligence estimates, disease risk, and yes, mental health conditions.
A report might read "Bipolar Disorder — Elevated Risk." For a lot of parents, that reads as "keep looking."
And the pronatalist crowd in tech is pushing hard for germline editing — changes that get passed to future generations. Malcolm and Simone Collins actively practice embryo selection. Coinbase's Brian Armstrong has spoken publicly about it. Sam Altman, too. Their recurring argument is simple: it's already happening, so we should just regulate it openly.
Germline editing is prohibited in most countries. Which is why the one man we know tried it anyway — Chinese scientist He Jiankui — spent three years in prison.
For a deeper look at how precise gene editing actually works inside human embryos, see our coverage of base editing in the NANOG master-switch gene.
The Math Doesn't Lie: Why Your Embryo Profile Is Mostly Noise
Let's get into the science, because this is where the whole enterprise starts to look less like enhancement and more like gambling with extra steps.
Most genes are pleiotropic, which means they do more than one thing. Most traits — diseases, height, intelligence — are polygenic, influenced by hundreds or thousands of genes working in concert. Bipolar disorder isn't sitting in one neat little gene waiting to be snipped out. It's a distributed network effect.
Then there's the R-squared value, which measures how well a genetic model predicts an outcome. Companies might share R-squared values of 4 percent or above, which in real-world terms represents a minuscule difference. With complex traits, the most you can often do is bump the odds by a fraction — if that.
And where does this data come from? Biobanks. Massive population databanks that try to correlate health outcomes with genetic markers. The U.K. Biobank, one of the biggest, uses what New York Magazine's Christopher Cox reported is essentially a minutes-long game of Concentration as its intelligence test for participants. You can build a house on a foundation like that, sure. But don't be surprised when the walls crack.
So when Nucleus Genomics tells you your embryo has an "elevated risk" for bipolar disorder based on a 4 percent R-squared model built on a card-matching game, you're not getting science. You're getting theater with a price tag.
The He Jiankui Warning: Getting What You Want
He Jiankui edited the CCR5 gene in three embryos to make them resistant to HIV. CCR5 is a protein that helps the virus enter human cells, so knocking it out sounded brilliant on paper.
It wasn't.
A deficiency in CCR5 opens the door to a host of other health problems — susceptibility to West Nile virus, increased vulnerability to influenza and other infections, probably a higher risk of dying from the flu. He protected these babies from a rare disease only to potentially make them victims of common ones. And here's the part that keeps me up at night: this vulnerability is heritable. Their children will inherit it too.
He Jiankui got exactly what he wanted. And it created something worse. It's Oscar Wilde's second tragedy — the one where you get what you want, and that turns out to be the greater calamity.
CRISPR can also snip the wrong place entirely. Off-target editing is a documented problem, and in germline work, those mistakes don't stay with one person. They propagate through generations.
He spent three years in prison for what he did. But the precedent is set, and the technology keeps getting cheaper.
Designer Babies Are a Myth — Altered Babies Are the Reality
We will never have designer babies. We'll have altered babies, whose strengths will also prove to be weaknesses. This isn't speculation — it's what the biology tells us, and it's what history keeps demonstrating.
Depression may be linked to deep empathy. Marfan syndrome — that connective-tissue disorder — may have contributed to Abraham Lincoln's extraordinary stature and endurance. The genes we're racing to eliminate often carry hidden credits we haven't learned to read yet.
Pleiotropy makes this unavoidable. You can't edit a gene for one trait in isolation. Every gene is doing five things at once, and when you change its expression, you're rearranging a whole orchestra, not swapping out one instrument.
The cultural bias here is as twined as the double helix itself. We assume human diversity can — and should — be optimized away. But genetic enhancement without genetic loss is impossible. We won't have one without the other.
Maybe those embryo profiles listing "risks" should be required to include something else: the range of people who fit that same profile. Abraham Lincoln for depression. Vincent van Gogh for bipolar disorder. Words like "capable of leaping" alongside the risk percentages.
What We're Really Selecting Against
I think about my mother a lot when I read about embryo selection. She used to punctuate conversations by declaring women's genetic inferiority — no female Shakespeares, no great female chefs, because we "didn't have the genes."
When she died and I cleaned out her things, I found something that stopped me cold. She'd taken articles of mine and had them professionally laminated. Kept them carefully hidden in her closet.
We never talked about my writing. I would never have called my mother proud. But there they were, preserved, protected, hidden away from anyone who might see that she was wrong about me.
Like Kennedy, it seems she found something valuable where she probably least expected it.
The future of biohacking may just be a future of hacking away — cutting into the human genome and removing pieces we don't understand, in pursuit of a version of humanity that doesn't exist. We're not designing anything. We're just getting smaller, narrower, more mediocre — one embryo at a time.
The question isn't whether we can edit our genes. We already can. The question is whether we should keep selecting against the very traits that make us capable of leaping.