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 like “Height is 80% genetic” and “IQ is 50% genetic.” There was no mention of prevent serious diseasesbut of optimize human performance.
The business behind the slogans
The mastermind behind this campaign is Kian Sadeghia 25-year-old startup founder 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 from $9,999the complete 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 further 2,000 possible diseasescombining 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 linked to intelligence or height are often “statistical betting” and, to date, there is no scientific evidence that this performance selection method 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 fertilizationa technique that has been around for almost fifty years. Only in Italyin 2023, almost 90 thousand couples underwent it, leading to the birth of over 17 thousand children. The process involves the stimulation of ovulationThe egg retrieval and theirs 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 it DNA. It allows you to identify 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, add the statistical effect of thousands of genetic variants to calculate a chancenot a diagnosis. This test estimates, for example, the risk of Alzheimer’s, height or potential IQ. The huge limitation of this test is that ignores the impact of the environment, of education, of nutrition And of lived experiencesfactors that weigh as much or more than genetics itself.
- THE’Andgenetic 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 prohibited in much of the world, including Italy, but recent documents from Wall Street Journal reveal that an American company, Quotesis reportedly considering experiments in the United Arab Emirates, where laws are more flexible.
The situation in Italy and the ethical dilemmas
In Italy, the law 40 regulates medically assisted fertilization in a restrictive manner. Access is allowed 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 pathologiesWhile Gene editing is strictly prohibited. In the United States, however, regulation even allows for select the sex of the unborn child 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 it prenatal screening for trisomy 21 (Down 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 it eugenic drift (set of theories and practices to improve the genetic quality of a certain population).
But the real ethical short circuit occurs when we pass from curation 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 that transform current social inequalities into inequalities embedded directly in DNA. Also, which one psychological burden Would it burden 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.
