THE SET-UP: The first quarter of the 21st Century has been a truly weird mash-up of retrograde social and cultural ideas with Jetsons-like technological innovations that should be inspiring hope … but seem evermore dystopian with each passing day.
This marriage of the worst of the past with a stillborn hope for the future is epitomized by the rapid growth of power-hungry A.I. data centers. Big Tech is not blazing a path to a renewable world of clean energy and benevolent computing … with solar or wind or geothermal energy being essentially transformed into a cure for cancer by a super-intelligent A.I. medical research agent quietly humming away in carbon neutral facility.
Instead we have Elon Musk powering one of the world’s largest A.I. supercomputers with, according to Futurism, “35 portable gas-powered turbines” that not only generate “enough electricity…to power a small city,” but also generate “harmful, smog-forming pollutants” like “nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde.” What’s worse is that the facility is strategically located near a predominantly Black neighborhood in Memphis, Tennessee. Like many polluting industries of the 20th Century, Musk’s hallucinatory supercomputer conveniently landed in a potential sacrifice zone where the people often lack the money and the political power to stop the people with lots of money and political power from doing as they please for profit and, in the process, sacrificing local residents’ health. They certainly won’t be getting any jobs from A.I., either.
The most garish example of this is President Donald Trump’s dream of building a new coal-burning power plants next door to data centers—marrying the worst polluter from 19th Century with 21st Century’s leading contender for the same title. In fact, Trump is something of a matchmaker between the 19th and 21st Centuries. Coal is very 19th Century. So, too, are tariffs. He often says the end of the 19th Century was America’s high point and he’s intent on recreating that today. And he loves another 19th Century notion—eugenics.
Perhaps, then, it’s not surprising that eugenics is making a comeback.
Trump never paid a political price for repeatedly touting eugenics-style ideas. Is that because we are generally okay with eugenics? Well, we are about to find out … because, like so many things in this century, technology is making a bad idea very feasible. Very-very. - jp
TITLE: Massive NIH study challenges use of race as a proxy for genetic ancestry in research
https://www.statnews.com/2025/06/05/nih-all-of-us-genetics-study-examines-nuanced-interplay-of-race-and-genetics/
EXCERPTS: A large government study published Thursday shows more definitively than ever before that Americans’ self-reported race is a poor proxy for their genetic ancestry. Researchers said the findings have major implications for the way health disparities are studied, and how they are discussed in the public sphere.
In the study, published Thursday in the American Journal of Human Genetics, researchers analyzed the genomes of more than 200,000 participants in the All of Us cohort, which was established by the NIH to create a dataset that accurately represented the makeup of the United States.
The study mapped people’s self-reported race with their genetic ancestry, and through several different analyses, it points to a much fuzzier understanding of race, as opposed to thinking of racial groups as distinct and easily defined.
In one case, it used body mass index as an example of how broad racial categories can be misleading. The study found that those with West African ancestry were predisposed to have a high BMI while those with East African ancestry were predisposed to not have a high BMI, but those groups may be lumped together if a study just accounts for someone having African ancestry.
The study could have a profound influence on the way geneticists conduct and frame their work. Historically, the idea that race was inextricably linked to biology was used to justify health disparities and other forms of racial bias.
“Race and ethnicity are poor proxies for genetic ancestry; therefore, biomedical research should adjust directly for ancestries estimated from genetic data rather than relying on self-identified race or ethnicity,” the study’s lead author, Charles Rotimi, scientific director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, wrote in an email to reporters.
Just minutes after that email was sent, an NIH spokesperson responded, “Hi all – please hold on using these responses until you hear from me,” but did not follow up by the time of publication.
STAT reached out to the paper’s co-authors outside of the NIH. Only one responded, writing that “all communication related to the paper is under review by HHS, and we do not have approval to participate in press interviews.”
The screening of scientists’ communications contrasts with NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya’s promise to foster a culture of free speech. Bhattacharya’s boss, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has similarly pledged to promote “radical transparency.”
After publication, NIH made Rotimi available for an interview. He said the study results point to race being the wrong way to think about a person’s risk of disease — and should encourage researchers to think of people on a more individual level. The results don’t necessarily invalidate previous work that has found genetic differences between races, he said, but “those past findings are not as precise as they should have been, or they should be. As we gather more data with large cohorts like All of Us, we should be in a better position to truly characterize people.”
The current study is part of a long and often-fraught history of geneticists and ideas of race.
Since Charles Darwin proposed the basics of what would become the field of genetics, people have tried to apply its principles to racial groups. Soon after Darwin proposed his theory of evolution, his cousin, Francis Galton, created the foundations of what would become the eugenics movement. On the first page of his book “Hereditary Genius,” Galton writes he was interested in understanding “the mental peculiarities of different races.”
“He spent his career trying to, in the primitive ways that were available at the time, prove that Europeans were biologically superior. It’s continuous, since then, it’s never, ever been dropped,” said Eric Turkheimer, a behavior geneticist at the University of Virginia who has written about the way Trump’s Make America Great Again movement could affect the field of genomics.
“The majority of population geneticists try not to promote the narrative that there are these discrete genetic racial clusters, because that’s not what the data tells us, not what the last 70 years of research tell us,” said Jedidiah Carlson, a population geneticist who has studied how some population genetics data are used in right-wing circles.
The new paper does not mince words in its recommendation to scientists, but how it may be interpreted by the general public is much harder to pin down.
While the text and analyses of the paper point to race being a social construct, the way that the paper still leans on ancestry by subcontinental groups could allow for people to interpret the paper as simply calling for more granular racial categories.
“You can build a narrative around this that says, ‘Our socially constructed view is completely true.’ You can also build another view, which is, ‘It’s a little different than we thought it was back in the day. But the socially defined races look like they have pretty different ancestry components,’” said Aaron Panofsky, the director of the Institute for Society and Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has studied how conservatives have used genetics. He said that the paper is written in such a way that it “does not just double down on all these straightforward, old-style ways of talking about it, but it can’t emancipate itself from the problematic space of race and ethnicity. In some ways, it slips back in, and I believe it contradicts it. I think it’s very open to interpretation. It doesn’t settle anything.”
Another potential interpretation is that the paper supports the rationale the NIH has used in recent weeks when terminating research grants it deems related to DEI, which states, “Research programs based primarily on artificial and non-scientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry.”
For his part, Rotimi, the lead author, said he tries to stay out of politics and likes “my data to speak for me.” He said his lab views race “as really a social construct. It doesn’t mean it’s not useful, but it’s truly a social construct. And the best way I can describe that is to say that trying to use genetics to define race or to use genetics to support our racial classification is like slicing soup. You can cut all you want — that soup is going to stay mixed.”
TITLE: Under The Guise Of ‘Preventative Medicine’ For IVF, Eugenics Is Back
https://thefederalist.com/2025/06/06/under-the-guise-of-preventative-medicine-for-ivf-eugenics-is-back/
EXCERPTS: Most people are familiar with eugenics as a disturbing and morally repugnant artifact from the past, something we associate with Nazi experiments and racial pseudo-science. But it’s making a comeback in our time thanks to new branding and new technology. Call it neo-eugenics, coming soon to an IVF clinic near you.
The old eugenics was of course the study and practice of shaping a population through selective breeding based on heritable traits deemed desirable, and the sterilization or prohibition on reproduction for those deemed undesirable. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, eugenics produced a nasty set of policies, both in the United States and Europe. These policies were eventually discredited and discarded in part because Nazi Germany was big on eugenics. It was official Nazi policy, for example, to identify various groups of German citizens deemed “unfit” and then systematically kill them with poison gas — a practice that turned out to be a precursor to the Holocaust.
But now eugenics is making a comeback thanks to Peter Thiel-inspired libertarian tech-bros who have, no kidding, rebranded it “preventative medicine.” This week, a company called Nucleus Genomics, a genetics testing startup founded by a 25-year-old named Kian Sadeghi, unveiled a new product called Nucleus Embryo that allows parents to screen embryos created through IVF by projected IQ, height, eye color, and hundreds of other traits before deciding which to implant and which to discard.
The company is marketing this new product, which costs $5,999, as “preventative medicine,” a hi-tech health tool that delivers what the company calls “polygenic risk scores,” meant to predict the likelihood of things like Alzheimer’s, heart disease and various cancers — among many other things, including IQ, height, and hundreds of other traits.
But calling it “preventative medicine” is just a bit of lazy legerdemain. It doesn’t change the fact that Nucleus Embryo is nothing more than a hi-tech form of eugenics — screening the unborn for “desirable” traits like IQ and snuffing out those deemed undesirable or unfit. Much like the Nazis would have done if they’d had such technology. As Michael Knowles noted on X, “To be clear, this technology does not help you extend your baby’s life; it provides information — and dubious information, at that — to help you kill your weakest children.”
When Sadeghi was called out on social media about the obvious fact that he’s hawking a eugenics product, he doubled down, insisting that what he euphemistically calls “genetic optimization” somehow isn’t eugenics. “Everyone talks about optimizing health,” wrote Sadeghi. “When someone says that, they don’t just mean the absence of disease. They mean thriving, in every sense: cognitively, physically, etc.”
By slipping in “cognitively,” and touting the IQ component to his genetic screening product, Sadeghi has collapsed two very different things while pretending that he’s just giving parents tools to screen for disease. He’s not, he’s enabling a form of neo-eugenics targeted at children in utero.
In a response to my colleague Mark Hemingway, Sadeghi expressed shock that anyone would think his company is offering a eugenics service. “Since when is preventative medicine eugenics? And if a couple exercises their right to choose their own embryo based on what matter [sic] most to them… that’s eugenics?”
Yes, that’s eugenics. And all it takes to grasp that simple fact is a crude moral compass and an ability to reason that’s slightly more developed that a kindergartener’s.
To help tech-bros like Sadeghi understand why this is eugenics, let’s do a little thought experiment that plays into liberal pieties. Using Sadeghi’s own framing, let’s say a couple chooses their embryo based on what matters most to them. And let’s say that what matters most to them is skin tone and eye color — light skin and blue, to be specific. And let’s say, too, that a couple wants to screen for the likelihood that their baby will grow up to be gay, trans, or not-white-enough, and then eliminate all those “unfit” embryos? What if they simply want to rid their family tree of what they consider to be low-IQ gays and Untermensch filth? Isn’t that their right, as parents? To “choose their own embryo,” as Sadeghi put it?
This is of course exactly what Sadeghi and Nucleus Genomics are offering, and the only accurate thing to call it is eugenics.
I don’t mean to single out this one company and its morally bankrupt tech-bro founder. This sort of thing is becoming the norm in a Silicon Valley increasingly populated by techies who either haven’t spent five seconds thinking about the moral and ethical implications of the technologies they’re working on, or are cynically pretending not to understand the valid moral objections to those technologies.
Take for example Noor Siddiqui, founder of a genetic screening company called Orchid that was the subject of a New York Times piece back in April. In the article we learn that when Siddiqui was a child her mother developed a condition called retinitis pigmentosa, which gradually leads to partial or complete blindness. Watching her mother go through that, Siddiqui says, “burned a hole in my heart for a while,” and eventually led her to found Orchid, which not only screens embryos’ DNA for hundreds of conditions like retinitis pigmentosa, but also offers a similar type of polygenic screening that Nucleus Genomics offers, giving parents a risk profile for various conditions and diseases — along with a bunch of other stuff.
What is less often emphasized, because of its obvious association with Nazi-style eugenics, is all that other stuff: traits like IQ, height, hair color, and so on. So when Siddiqui posts a video on X saying, “Sex is for fun, and embryo screening is for babies,” and, “It’s going to become insane not to screen for these things,” it’s doesn’t take much to see how these technologies could usher in a neo-eugenic regime — at least for those who can afford it. It also doesn’t take much to see how morally fraught such a regime would be.
TITLE: ‘Make America Healthy Again’ echoes ugly 20th century eugenics | Opinion
https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/readers-opinion/guest-commentary/article306387376.html
EXCERPT: Today, the supposedly benign language of wellness and self-improvement can be seen as a subtle reincarnation of eugenics thinking. Modern health trends such as the pursuit of the perfect body, the rise of clean eating and the obsession with biohacking often come packaged as empowerment and personal freedom. However, they are exclusionary, reinforcing ideals of thinness, whiteness and wealth as moral virtues. Thinness is seen not just as a physical trait but as a marker of moral worth, as though those who maintain a low weight are more disciplined, healthy or virtuous. This mirrors the early 20th century eugenic obsession with purity, control and the “ideal” body. Eugenicists believed in controlling who could reproduce based on these very same ideas of purity and superior traits, a mindset that seems to have been repackaged into today’s wellness culture.
The focus on health optimization also reflects a moral judgment about worthiness. The growing trend toward viewing health as an individual responsibility plays directly into a neoliberal form of eugenics. Political figures such as U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has become a prominent voice in the anti-vaccine movement, have appropriated the language of health to assert moral superiority. His movement’s slogan, “Make America Healthy Again,” frames health as a moral imperative and a political one.
RFK Jr.’s rhetoric echoes the eugenic ideas of the early 20th century, when people who were deemed unhealthy, mentally ill or “degenerate” were seen as burdens to society. His public statements pathologize people with neurodivergence, suggesting that certain populations (those with autism, for instance) are a problem to be solved and not a community to be supported. He claims that the rise in autism is linked to vaccines or environmental toxins, despite overwhelming scientific evidence debunking these theories. By framing autism as a tragedy that “didn’t exist” before now, he reinforces a long-standing eugenic stereotype: that disabled people are not just different but defective.
The question we must ask ourselves is: Who gets to be healthy, beautiful and worthy in today’s society? Why does every woman want to have the perfect pink Pilates body and lifestyle? And more important, who gets excluded from these categories? It’s not about calling wellness bad. It’s about interrogating who gets to define wellness, and who gets left out of the conversation.
The American eugenics movement didn’t die — it just changed outfits. Today, it struts around as wellness culture, health populism and Silicon Valley biohacking, peddling the same old judgments about who’s worthy and who’s disposable, now with better branding and a green juice. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might not call it eugenics, but if it quacks like superiority and walks like exclusion, well — check your history books.
TITLE: Uninformed comments on autism are resonant of dangerous ideas about eugenics
https://theconversation.com/uninformed-comments-on-autism-are-resonant-of-dangerous-ideas-about-eugenics-256762
EXCERPTS: During the height of the movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, eugenics was promoted by scientists, physicians, politicians and clergy, authoritative voices who encouraged the “fittest” to reproduce while recommending that those people with “undesirable” physical or intellectual traits be removed from society. Part of achieving this goal meant people with disabilities were sterilized or institutionalized.
Eugenics was applied in its most extreme form in Nazi Germany during the 1930s and ‘40s. Six million Jews, and millions more people, including an estimated 250,000 people with disabilities, were killed.
A formal condemnation of Nazi actions in the form of the Nuremberg Trials fostered a popular backlash to these Nazi horrors after the Second World War, resulting in a global repudiation of eugenic ideas and a gradual phasing out of practices such as sterilization and institutionalization of people with disabilities.
However, Kennedy Jr.’s comments [on autism] remind us that eugenic ideas are alive and well, including, but not exclusively, amid the radical right and tech-enabled ideas about a return to “strongman” values.
Eugenics ideas exist in the form of what bioethicist and humanities scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls “eugenic logic.” This is the ongoing belief that erasing disability and people with disabilities is a desirable and common-sense objective.
The power of eugenics logic surrounds us. It shapes immigration policy that penalizes disability. It means reproductive technologies and medical practices are used to eliminate certain conditions that cause disabilities.
For example, recently, the Québec College of Physicians called for legislation to allow the euthanasia of severely disabled infants. This also affirms the views of popular but controversial philosopher Peter Singer, who argues that babies with disabilities lack qualities of personhood and therefore could be killed.
RFK Jr.’s eugenics ideas resonate strongly today. They square politically with neoliberalism to create a form of ableism that regards the individual citizen as “an able-bodied entrepreneurial entity.”
Neoliberal ableism links human value to their capacity to work, to what disability studies scholars Dan Goodley and Rebecca Lawthom refer to the ability to “productively contribute … bounded and cut off from others, capable, malleable and compliant.”
People with autism, and others who cannot serve society in this way, threaten the neoliberal order and capitalism. They are seen as a detriment to society.