Making babies, the hidden AI genetic revolution ...
The AI Arms Race: How the technology of our times is reshaping the global order.
~ Foreign Policy, June 2025
A.I. Will Destroy Critical Thinking in K-12
~ The New York Times, May 2025
AI will replace most humans, but then what?
~ Reuters, August 2025
Three headlines, three issues of concern—AI destroying education, robots destroying jobs, and the threat of Chinese military superiority.
These are THE topics of concern when discussing threats posed by artificial intelligence. And they are worthy topics given what we know and don’t know about the AI revolution.
But a more pressing issue is being ignored.
Bill Drexel exposes the invisible AI revolution in the fall issue of The New Atlantis: “The AI Genetics Revolution Is Coming.” This genetics revolution is not new, but artificial intelligence adds new capabilities that were in the realm of science fiction less than twenty years ago.
Drexel’s article may be a paywalled except for subscribers to The New Atlantis, and it’s a bit technical at places. So, I’ll excerpt a few portions that illustrate how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing baby making, in addition to other things. Actually, AI is revolutionizing a revolution in baby making that’s been ongoing since the 1970s.
AI already provides a “proof of concept” for a revolution in gene editing. AI will bring dramatic advancements to medicine, but it will also bring numerous moral and ethical dilemmas into focus.
Should people of means [wealth] be able to hardwire physical or cognitive advantages into their descendants?
Where is the line between medical therapy [treatments for illness or injury] and dehumanizing enhancements [making better than well, making tall children or with certain eye color].
And it’s necessary to add that some parents want to make crippled babies—deaf babies so they can be deaf like their parents.
Put simply, AI offers insight into how to write and rewrite the genetic code of life.
If we know how life’s information is stored and structured, perhaps we can rewrite it according to our own designs. ...
In a very real sense, genes are a language — a system to record and transmit information — but one that humans are simply ill-suited to speak. ...
[Even so, AI] is likely to be to genetics what calculus was to physics, providing the tools necessary to harness the full power of biology and making earlier efforts appear primitive by comparison.
Presently the “most wide-ranging and ambitious project using AI to decipher the language of genetics” is the Evo 2 system.
[This] system is trained on the genetic information of “all known living species — and a few extinct ones,” comprising a dataset of almost 9 trillion nucleotides, in hopes of parsing the function of DNA in every domain of life. It has already shown promise in predicting which among an individual’s many genetic mutations are most likely to contribute to diseases like cancer, in identifying new relationships between multiple scattered genes, and in writing novel genetic code.
Additionally, this massive amount of AI generated genetic information is being used to develop synthetic tools for directing how genes act. Drexel lists some of these other AI projects—all a little complicated, but please read on.
Yale, M.I.T., and Harvard have collaborated in using AI to author synthetic DNA sequences that are able to switch genes on or off according to particular circumstances, a major boon for the specificity possible in gene therapy. ...
AI techniques are not only reading and writing genomic data: they are also creating the tools needed to make more effective CRISPR gene editors, the leading method to manipulate genetic material. Until recently, CRISPR-based gene editors had largely been derived from existing, naturally-occurring microbes and adapted for use in cells of other organisms, including humans. Even while this method was hailed as a breakthrough in the granularity with which scientists could edit genetic material, it has still been plagued by imprecision and “off-target effects” — that is, unintended genetic edits. By feeding massive amounts of protein data into [AI] large language models, biologists are beginning to be able to create bespoke [custom-made] CRISPR gene-editing proteins from scratch that are precisely designed for specialized purposes. This method is both more effective at locating and splicing specific genes with fewer misfires, and has a long runway ahead for continued improvements.
For a primer on CRISPR technology, what it is and how it works, see “What is CRISPR? A bioengineer explains,” linked below.
It’s the synthetic tools that make these developments interesting and challenging, since they offer both perils and promises. An example on the promises side is Victoria Gray. In 2019, she was the first person in the U.S. to receive CRISPR treatment for a genetic disease, sickle cell anemia.
But Bill Drexel is focused on the perils side of the AI genetic arms race since the Chinese operate by different ethical system than the West.
The geopolitical race for AI dominance is upending the historic monopoly that Western nations have had in shaping international bioethical norms. China’s remarkable progress in AI, along with its demonstrated willingness to experiment with genetically enhancing its population, raise the possibility that a totalitarian state with profoundly different ethical standards from our own will have at least equal say in determining the future of genetic engineering.
Drexel adds details to clarify the significance of the AI genetic arms race.
American bioethicists are accustomed to monitoring biotech progress with the assumption that whatever becomes feasible will likely do so first in the United States. Or at least, it will happen among scientists who have been acculturated by Western institutions and their form of bioethics. That is unlikely to be the case with the budding AI-biotech revolution: indications are that China has the capability and willingness to turn Western bioethics on its head.
China’s stated goals are to edge out the United States in AI by 2030 and in biotech by 2035. Whether or not it will succeed remains to be seen, but it is safe to say China will be a fierce contender, especially in genetics.
On the AI side, China is rapidly closing the gap in [AI] large language model capabilities, as the explosive launch of DeepSeek’s R1 model in January showed. Remarkably, the engineers on the team that built the product were trained almost entirely in China, highlighting the extent to which the country’s indigenous AI ecosystem has become competitive with that of the United States. Moreover, whereas American AI policy has become increasingly fixated on racing toward superintelligence, Beijing is instead more focused on developing AI for specific applied purposes, including genomic research. American export controls on advanced chips to China are designed to curtail China’s prospects for developing highly compute-intensive, superintelligent systems, but they do little to restrain its ability to develop genomic AI.
In fact, easy access to Western genetic data bases aid the Chinese in their quest to dominate in the genetic arms race.
Zoom in on genomic data — the lifeblood of next-generation biotechnology — and the picture looks even more alarming. Western countries’ privacy laws and scientific ethos have meant that building large databases of human genomic data is difficult but, where achieved, tends to be made openly available for researchers internationally. China has long taken advantage of this openness while also aggressively seeking access to international genomic data through illegal channels, and while compiling data on its own citizens, particularly its Uyghur minority, and on millions of women around the world via Chinese-built prenatal tests. Motivated by a more acute sense of food insecurity than the United States, China is also already a leader in agricultural genomics — expertise that is likely transferable to a broader literacy in genomics.
To be clear, there are still considerable hurdles. There remains a tremendous amount of mystery in genetics. And the biological complexity that modulates how genes function is formidable.
Even so, the trajectory is clear. As commentators clamor over whether superintelligence looms, AI is quietly bringing about a much more certain future: one in which humanity is able to “speak” — and write — genes with fluency.
Bill Drexel also notes the Chinese plan to experiment with genetically enhancing its own population.
For many years, CCP leaders have been clear in calling for a renewed focus on the quality of Chinese children in the wake of what the Party considers the success of its one-child policy in controlling their quantity. The CCP’s 2021 five-year plan likewise noted the goal to “improve the quality of the birth population.” In the light of initiatives like China’s infamous — and later renamed — 1994 Eugenics and Health Protection Law, it takes little imagination to guess where all this is headed.
Still clearer are the indications from BGI, China’s leading genomic company, which claims to be one of the largest genomics organizations in the world and is buoyed by heavy state support. The company has run an initiative to discern the genetic basis for IQ. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if there were certain tweaks you could make in utero that would enhance the performance of our brain?” one of the project’s scientists told the New Yorker in 2014. A Reuters investigation in 2021 found that the company developed its prenatal test, used by millions of women worldwide, in collaboration with the Chinese army and used it in the service of improving the country’s “population quality.”
According to a publication of the state media company Shanghai United Media Group, the president and cofounder of BGI forbids his employees from having children with birth defects, which he says would be a “disgrace” to the company. Not one of the 1,400 children born to employees has had serious congenital diseases, he says. “In the United States and in the West, you have a certain way,” he told the New Yorker. “You feel you are advanced and you are the best. Blah, blah, blah. You follow all these rules and have all these protocols and laws and regulations. You need somebody to change it. To blow it up.” If history is any guide, China will do just that.
Most geneticists are motived by good intentions, according to Drexel
These developments are exciting for all the right reasons. They represent a potential quantum leap in our ability to understand and address the genetic underpinnings of diseases that have long evaded conventional treatments. This is not to mention the prospects for more resilient crops, enhanced biomanufacturing, and personalized medicine.
Yet, he has to admit that even in the arena of good intentions genetic medicine presents all sorts of opportunities for ethical mischief.
It is also difficult to overstate how morally fraught these capabilities may prove.
Designer babies is the use case that typically comes to mind, but it is unlikely to be the first case to consider in a world in which precision gene-editing would still be delicate and expensive.
A more likely eugenic path would be through in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), a rapidly advancing technique that can create egg and sperm cells from, say, skin cells or other ordinary cells in the body. Already successfully used to create healthy offspring in mice, there is the obvious prospect that IVG could allow prospective parents to create industrial quantities of viable embryos, nullifying the difficulty that has characterized harvesting human egg cells. On top of this, AI’s increasing illumination of genetic information could dramatically improve the power of genetic screening.
Put the two together — a vastly larger pool of embryos to pick and choose from, and much better tools for predicting their traits from their genes — and you have eugenics by other means. That is: designer babies by overproduction and precision selection.
Bill Drexel’s focus is foreign policy—artificial intelligence competition with China. He is no doubt aware of developments in the U.S. which parallel those in China. At least he could have added a paragraph to clarify the shortcomings the ethics of western genetic medicine. Ethical and legal standards are so lax that some speak of the wild west of reproductive medicine.
What the Chinese aim at doing by state policy and are already allowing by permitting coercion in some corporations, Americans and other Westerns are doing as consumer choice. That is made abundantly clear by the Noor Siddiqui, founder and CEO of Orchid Health.
Sex is for fun, and embryo screening is for babies.
It’s going to become insane not to screen for things like obesity, autism and possibly intelligence.
Orchid’s goal is very much in line with the Chinese ambition to “improve the quality of the birth population.” Orchid advocates for consumer choice to “have healthy babies by mitigating risks with the world’s most advanced whole genome screening for embryos during IVF.”
In short, make lots of embryos and screen for any unwanted characteristics. The name for this is eugenics and the goal is to eliminate the undesirables. Screening would look for the potential for coronary artery disease, diabetes, bipolar disorder, prostate cancer, and Alzheimer’s. Eye color and height may also options for consideration.
Consumer eugenics is a more precise term for this form of baby shopping.
Even The New York Times is worried about the ethics of baby shopping—needless to say, not for biblical and theological reasons. Here’s the final paragraph from “This baby was carefully selected as an embryo.”
Right now, the availability of polygenic embryo screening is dictated by the market, its promise most vocally endorsed by the tech elite, who, as backers of the companies selling it, may have a vested interest in promoting it. The ability to act on the information it purports to provide — to hire a personal trainer, switch to an all-organic diet or consult health specialists who don’t take insurance — is also reserved for those with means. One doesn’t have to fully buy into its promises to worry about its implications, to wonder if this is a space in which market forces should perhaps not be given free rein and to feel that, whether or not we avail ourselves of polygenic embryo screening, it and related innovations will eventually have implications for us all.
[Bold added]
The AI Genetics Revolution Is Coming, Bill Drexel (The New Atlantis, Fall 2025)
What is CRISPR? A bioengineer explains, StanfordReport (June 10, 2024)
This baby was carefully selected as an embryo, The New York Times (April 2025)
Brave New World has arrived.