Choosing the hair color, height or IQ of your future child as if you were creating an avatar in a video game: a scene that until yesterday only belonged to science fiction films is now entering the real market. In the fall of 2025, passengers on the New York subway found themselves faced with an advertising campaign with a dystopian flavor. The slogan was on the billboards: “Have your best baby” (have your best child), accompanied by strong statements such as “Height is 80% genetic” and “IQ is 50% genetic”. We were not talking about preventing serious diseases, but about optimizing human performance.
The business behind the slogans
The mastermind behind this campaign is Kian Sadeghi, a 25-year-old founder of the startup Nucleus Genomics. Sadeghi built the company’s mission (and its sales strategy) starting from a personal drama such as the loss of his fifteen-year-old cousin due to a genetic disease. The associated website, pickyourbaby.comfeatures an interface reminiscent of digital editors for character creation. But the costs bring us back to reality. The basic package starts at $9,999, the full experience (which includes the IVF cycle, screening of up to 20 embryos and personalized care) costs $9,999 per month for four months.
The promise is to identify over 2,000 possible diseases, combining these with the “performative” characteristics promoted by the campaign. Despite the media coverage, much of the scientific world has distanced itself from this practice. Researchers warn that genetic scores tied to intelligence or height are often “statistical gambles” and, to date, there is no scientific evidence that this method of performance selection actually works.
How in vitro fertilization works today
To understand how much is real and how much is marketing, we need to take a step back and look at in vitro fertilization, a technique that has existed for almost fifty years. In Italy alone, in 2023, almost 90 thousand couples underwent it, leading to the birth of over 17 thousand children. The process involves the stimulation of ovulation, the collection of oocytes and their fertilization in the laboratory. From here, between five and ten embryos are usually obtained. It is precisely in this window, before implantation in the uterus, that genetic selection can be carried out.soci
There are currently three “levels” of intervention on embryonic DNA:
- There Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGT): a few cells are taken from the embryo without damaging it to analyze its DNA. It allows the identification of serious genetic diseases (such as cystic fibrosis, hemophilia or sickle cell anemia), offering carrier couples the concrete possibility of having healthy children. We are in the field of care.
- The Polygenic Test (PGT-P): it is the service offered by companies like Nucleus Genomics. Instead of looking for a single altered gene, it adds the statistical effect of thousands of genetic variants to calculate a probability, not a diagnosis. This test estimates, for example, the risk of Alzheimer’s, height or potential IQ. The enormous limitation of this test is that it ignores the impact of the environment, education, nutrition and lived experiences, factors that weigh as much or more than genetics itself.
- Thegenetic diting with CRISPR: in this scenario you don’t choose between existing embryos, but you rewrite the DNA directly. The changes become heritable for future generations. This practice is banned in much of the world, including Italy, but recent documents from Wall Street Journal reveal that an American company, Preventive, is considering experiments in the United Arab Emirates, where laws are more flexible.
The situation in Italy and the ethical dilemmas
In Italy, law 40 regulates medically assisted fertilization in a restrictive manner. Access is permitted only to heterosexual couples with infertility/sterility problems or to fertile couples but carriers of hereditary genetic diseases. Preimplantation diagnosis is only permitted for serious pathologies, while gene editing is strictly prohibited. In the United States, however, regulations even allow the sex of the unborn child to be selected out of pure personal preference.
Genetic selection for prevention already raises complex debates. An emblematic case is that of Iceland: here almost all pregnant women choose prenatal screening for trisomy 21 (Down’s Syndrome) and almost all decide to terminate the pregnancy in case of positivity. As a result, in a population of 400 thousand inhabitants, children born with Down syndrome are almost non-existent. A fact that divides those who see it as a triumph of prevention from those who fear a eugenic drift (a set of theories and practices to improve the genetic quality of a certain population).
But the real ethical short circuit occurs when we move from cure to paid optimization. When a slogan states that height is 80% genetic, the subtext is that being short is a flaw. When we talk about 50% genetic IQ, it is suggested that we can intervene on an implicit ranking. If services costing tens of thousands of dollars became the norm for the wealthier classes, the risk would be to transform current social inequalities into inequalities embedded directly in DNA. Furthermore, what psychological burden would be placed on a child born after being designed to be “the best”, especially if real life does not match the expectations of his genetic makeup?
Technology advances rapidly, speaking the language of scalability and optimization typical of software. But science preaches caution, reminding us of biological complexity, the interaction between genes and environment, and statistical limits. We are in the middle, torn between the human desire to avoid pain and the disturbing risk of transforming birth into a design project.
