Why Silicon Valley is bringing eugenics back
By Paris Marx,
Disconnect
| 04. 21. 2023
Elon Musk has been warning about population decline and smaller families for years. In his 2015 biography, he’s quoted as saying, “if each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, that’s probably bad.” Musk is explicit that “smart” people need to be having more kids — he has nine living children, that we know of — but doesn’t go so far as to say that other people should be having fewer. After all, he does want the population to grow.
One of the problems with his narrative is that the global population is growing — it hit 8 billion people last year — as is the US population, though the rates of growth are slowing. Musk, however, acts as though we’re already in a state of decline, which suggests he’s more concerned with the growth rate of particular segments of the population than the population as a whole — as his concern about the procreation of “smart” people suggests.
Almost as long as Musk has been talking about this, there have been questions about how those concerns were reflected...
Related Articles
Since the “CRISPR babies” scandal in 2018, no additional genetically modified babies are known to have been born. Now several techno-enthusiastic billionaires are setting up privately funded companies to genetically edit human embryos, with the explicit intention of creating genetically modified children.
Heritable genome editing remains prohibited by policies in the overwhelming majority of countries that have any relevant policy, and by a binding European treaty. Support for keeping it legally off limits is widespread, including among scientists...
By Angus Liu, Fierce Pharma | 06.16.2025
A second patient has died following treatment with Sarepta Therapeutics’ Elevidys, raising more doubts about the Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) gene therapy’s safety profile.
Sarepta and its ex-U.S. partner Roche reported the death early Sunday. Like the first case, disclosed...
By Sophie Alexander and Ike Swetlitz, Bloomberg | 06.25.2025
A California-startup focused on genetically editing human embryos — a step toward creating so-called designer babies — is raising money as many of Silicon Valley’s ultra-rich turn their attention to one of the most controversial technologies in medicine.
Bootstrap Bio...