Genius children: Silicon Valley billionaires are throwing money at strategies to engineer brilliant children

This isn’t science fiction. It is Silicon Valley, where interest in breeding smarter babies is peaking.

Parents here are paying up to $50,000 for new genetic-testing services that include promises to screen embryos for IQ. Tech futurists such as Elon Musk are urging the intellectually gifted to multiply, while professional matchmakers are setting up tech execs with brilliant partners partly to get brilliant offspring.

“Right now I have one, two, three tech CEOs and all of them prefer Ivy League,” said Jennifer Donnelly, a high-end matchmaker who charges up to $500,000.

The growing IQ fetish is sparking debate, with bioethicists raising alarms about the new genetic-screening services.

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“Is it fair? This is something a lot of people worry about,” said Hank Greely, director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University. “It is a great science fiction plot: The rich people create a genetically super caste that takes over and the rest of us are proles.”

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