The New Face of Eugenics?

Posted on | November 4, 2025 | 1 Comment

Mike Magee MD

Few can possibly be surprised that, in the age of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, “Designer Babies” (among the billionaire tech crowd and their followers) are all the rage.

Seven years ago, He Jiankui, a gene editing scientist from China, took three human embryos and used Crispr technology to design in immunity from HIV. The Chinese government reaction was immediate. They charged Jiankul with illegal medical practices” and sent him to jail for three years.

But inside Peter Thiel’s “genius factory,” you can find incubating former Thiel Fellows – “the crazy smart youth paid by Peter Thiel to double down on entrepreneurship instead of school.” Begun in 2010, he set out to pay $100,000 to 20 people under the age of 20 to forge school and move to San Francisco to pursue their dreams.

In 2015, one Chinese immigrant to Canada landed a Fellow position. Her name is Cathy Tie. Now a decade later, she’s all grown up, and in the news as CEO of Manhattan Genomics, whose raison d’etre is “to end genetic disease and alleviate human suffering by fixing harmful mutations at the embryo stage.”

Tie says not to worry her intent is “disease correction, not enhancement.” Clearly she does not shy away from controversy. In the “stranger than fiction” category, it appears that she was romantically involved with He Jiankul in 2025 (even possibly married), but blocked form joining him in her birthplace of China in May, 2025, by the government despite her possessing a valid 10-year visa.

IVF professionals are slowing leaning into genetic redesign as preimplantation embryo screening for disease like cystic fibrosis and sickle cell become routine. But experts like Berkeley’s Molecular Therapeutics professor Fyodor Urnov disagree. He sees “quasi-eugenics” rearing its ugly head again in the service of elite self interest. In his words, “Why is money being poured into this? Because at the end of the day, those who have money want to ‘improve’ their babies.”

In March, 2025, He Jiankul drew 9.7 million views in a X tweet that began “Human will no longer be controlled by Darwin’s evolution.” Seven days later, he topped that with 13.7 million views of “Ethics is holding back scientific innovation and progress.” Perhaps Fyodor has a firmer grip than He on American history when it comes to the fallout of Darwinism even before the advent of AI.

In 1872, it all began innocently enough with Charles Darwin’s publication of “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.” He became the first scientist to use photographic images to “document the expressive spectrum of the face” in a publication. Typing individuals through their images and appearance “was a striking development for clinicians.”

Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, a statistician, took his cousin’s data and synthesized “identity deviation” and “reverse-engineered” what he considered the “ideal type” of human, “an insidious form of human scrutiny” that would become Eugenics ( from the Greek word, “eugenes” – meaning “well born”). Expansion throughout academia rapidly followed, and validation by our legal system helped spread and cement the movement to all kinds of “imperfection”, with sanitized human labels like “mental disability” and “moral delinquency.” Justice and sanity did catch up eventually, but it took decades, and that was before AI and neural networks.

What if Galton had had Gemini Ultra to advance the cause of genetic perfection? Complicating our future further, say experts, is the fact that generative AI with its “deep neural networks is currently a self-training, opaque ‘black box’…incapable of explaining the reasoning that led to its conclusion…Becoming more autonomous with each improvement, the algorithms by which the technology operates become less intelligible to users and even the developers who originally programmed the technology.” Add to this, an expanded (and potentially lucrative) focus on “virtual cells.” A contest for the best AI model of the H1 human stem cell line was just announced on June 26, 2025.

Laissez-faire as a social policy doesn’t seem to work well at the crossroads of genetics and technology. Useful, even groundbreaking discoveries, are likely on the AI horizon. But profit seeking entrepreneurs, in total, will likely further undermine equity and diversity and add cost while further complicating our already compromised experiment in democracy and self-governance.

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One Response to “The New Face of Eugenics?”

Mike Magee
November 4th, 2025 @ 3:14 pm

Genius???
https://www.wired.com/2016/12/inside-peter-thiels-genius-factory/

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The New Face of Eugenics?

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