Designer Genes for the Digital Overlords: Silicon Valley's Quiet March Toward Elitist Eugenics, By Brian Simpson

November 2025. Sam Altman — OpenAI's boy-wonder CEO, architect of the AI arms race — weds his partner Oliver Mulherin in a low-key gay ceremony that somehow still screams "power couple." Days later, the duo drops $30 million into Preventive, a San Francisco startup that's not-so-subtly engineering the end of "hereditary disease" through CRISPR-edited embryos. Joining them? Coinbase's Brian Armstrong, the crypto kingpin who's publicly gushed on X about editing embryos to forge kids with "stronger bones" and hearts less prone to betrayal. The pitch is pure techno-utopia: Snip out the bad DNA, birth a disease-free generation, and watch humanity level up. But peel back the venture-capital gloss, and this isn't philanthropy, it's technocratic eugenics, repackaged for the 21st century, where the elites don't just hoard wealth; they hoard evolution itself.

Preventive's founder, Lucas Harrington, a CRISPR acolyte mentored by Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, isn't hiding the ball. His lab in a WeWork knockoff is churning through preclinical trials, hunting for that first edited embryo to implant. They're not rushing to human trials yet, he swears, but the roadmap is clear: Scout looser regs in the UAE, where embryo tinkering isn't a federal felony, and get those "fixed" babies baking. Mulherin frames it as a family man's crusade, "helping families avoid genetic illness." Noble? Sure, if you ignore the fine print: This tech doesn't stop at disease. It slides straight into designer babies, IQ-boosted prodigies, athletes engineered for gold, heirs optimised for boardrooms. And who foots the bill? Not the barista in Brooklyn. Only the one percent can afford the $10,000 polygenic screenings from Preventive's cousins like Nucleus Genomics.

Call it what it is: Eugenics 2.0, Silicon Valley edition. The original flavour, state-mandated sterilisation, racial purity quotas, crashed and burned in the ashes of World War II. But swap the swastikas for stock options, and you've got a revival that's sneakier, shinier, and sold as salvation. These aren't mad scientists in lab coats; they're hoodie-clad disruptors with TED Talks and term sheets. Altman, who's already betting on AI to "solve" poverty (by automating it away), now wants to code humanity's source file. Armstrong, fresh off crypto crashes that minted billionaires from memes, sees embryos as the next blockchain: Immutable, scalable, and ripe for speculation. Their gospel? Nature's broken; let venture capital fix it. But the congregation? Exclusively the ultra-rich, who'll spawn a genetic aristocracy while the rest of us breed the old-fashioned way, flawed, fertile, and free.

The science is as seductive as it is suspect. CRISPR, Doudna's brainchild, slices DNA like a molecular scalpel. Preventive's betting it can excise mutations for cystic fibrosis or Huntington's before implantation. In theory: A world without inherited agony. In practice: Off-target cuts that rewrite unintended genes, sparking cancers or infertilities we won't spot for generations. Fyodor Urnov, a Berkeley gene-editing vet, didn't mince words: These outfits are "lying, delusional, or both," chasing "baby improvement" under the disease-prevention fig leaf. Stanford's Hank Greely chimes in: The risk-benefit ratio "sucks." Even Doudna, Harrington's old boss, is waving red flags: Proceed "responsibly," or don't proceed at all. Yet here we are, with a couple already lined up, a pair carrying a genetic curse, desperate for Preventive's miracle. How many "failed prototypes" get discarded in the IVF trash before the first success? How many GMO kids suffer the glitches, the autoimmune flares, the shortened lifespans, before the kinks are ironed out on someone else's offspring?

And that's before the transgenerational time bomb. Edit an embryo, and you're not just tweaking one life; you're rewriting the human genome forever. That kid's kids inherit the hack, intended or not. It's the plot of every sci-fi dystopia, but with real stakes: A bifurcated species, where elite lineages stack advantages (taller, smarter, disease-proof) and the underclass stays squishy and susceptible. Hulscher nails the parallel in his piece: Remember the mRNA shots? Billions jabbed, and now whispers of "severe transgenerational harm" in CDC kid-death stats. (I'll circle back to that.) Scale it to embryos, and you've got a genetic Ponzi scheme: Early adopters win big; later generations foot the fallout. The elites? They'll have private islands and bespoke bunkers when the ripples hit.

This isn't progress; it's predation. Technocracy, the rule of experts, metrics, and machines, thrives on the illusion of control. Altman and Armstrong aren't liberators; they're landlords of the future, leasing evolution to the highest bidder. Peter Thiel's already in the game, funding Orchid for embryo IQ scans. Alexis Ohanian's next door with Nucleus, peddling "enhanced" heredity for nine grand a pop. It's a club, and we're not on the guest list. The poor get Planned Parenthood; the powerful get Preventive. Eugenics for thee, but not for me, unless you're wiring seven figures.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein isn't ancient history; it's a warning label. Victor, the self-taught wunderkind, stitches life from death, convinced he's cheating mortality. His creature? A lonely abomination, stronger than men but starved for love, rampaging through isolation. Swap grave-robbing for genome-splicing, and you've got Preventive's lab: Billionaires birthing bespoke beings, blind to the moral recoil. What happens when the first edited kid, optimised for excellence, engineered without "flaws," discovers they're a prototype? Do they sue for their unedited humanity? Rebel against the code that coded them? Or worse: Conform, and accelerate the divide?

Hulscher draws the line to COVID's mRNA rollout, a "gene therapy" that skipped long-term trials, mandated for the masses, and now linked (in preliminary data) to spikes in child mortality and heritable weirdness. Billions as beta testers, courtesy of the same technocratic playbook: Promise cures, ignore caveats, profit wildly. Preventive's no different, except the test subjects are embryos, not adults, and the funders are even richer. If mRNA was the appetiser, this is the entree: Direct-to-DNA intervention, with side effects that echo through eternity.

The fix? Slam the brakes before the first implantation. Ban private funding for germline editing, full stop, no UAE loopholes, no "preclinical" pretences. Make it global: Tie trade deals to bioethics treaties, starve the start-ups of capital. Educate the desperate couples: IVF's success rate is already 30%; don't gamble your lineage on unproven hacks.

This isn't Luddism; it's leveling. Humanity's messy, miraculous code got us here, from caves to quantum physics. Let the elites edit their own genomes if they must, but keep the rest of us wildcards. Otherwise, Preventive isn't preventing disease; it's prescribing inequality, one snip at a time. The monster's at the door, stitched from ambition and adenine. Will we let it in, or bolt the lab?

In the end, true progress isn't perfection, it's humility. Nature's draft is full of typos, but it's ours. Silicon Valley's overlords can dream of designer dynasties; but the rest of us? We'll take our chances with the chaos. After all, every genius, from Newton to your weird uncle, was a glitch worth keeping.

https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/openai-ceo-sam-altman-and-his-husband