A personal genomics startup company has announced plans to launch a genetic intelligence testing service. Backed by technology investors, Nucleus Genomics released a disease screening product in March 2024, followed by a beta version of the “Nucleus IQ” test in late June – a product it eventually aims to roll our for all customers. News of the test is resurfacing controversies over the accuracy and ethics of using genetic data to identify and rate “innate” human abilities.

The company makes a big pitch about its “whole genome” sequencing and screening services. The Nucleus Genomics founder and CEO Kian Sadeghi announced on Twitter it was “launching a closed beta for Nucleus IQ — the first intelligence score based on your DNA”, with founding partner and chief operating officer Caio Hachem adding that its “analysis offers an unprecedented insight into the genetic factors that contribute to our cognitive abilities”.

The startup’s claims to innovation and novelty are backed by investment, scientific and industry partnerships. Nucleus has received almost $18 million dollars in funding from tech investors including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s  venture capital firm 776. Ohanian urged his twitter followers to join the waitlist for the Nucleus IQ test.

Scientifically and technically, the Nucleus Genomics service is built on the foundations of impute.me, a free open source website allowing users to upload their consumer genetics data for polygenic risk calculation, which Nucleus acquired in 2022. A partnership with Illumina, a global biotech firm, gives Nucleus access to advanced genomic technologies, while the analysis is undertaken by a genomics laboratory in Massachusetts and an informatics lab in North Carolina.

Like other investor-driven consumer genetics companies, such as 23andme, Nucleus is capitalizing on the promises of “precision medicine” and “personalized healthcare”, as well as the commercialization of previously not-for-profit scientific enterprises. In precision medicine approaches, the individual becomes treated as a “data transmitter” whose personal bioinformation is a valuable commodity. Nucleus offers customers the opportunity to share their data for future third party research and also advertises the benefits of “upgrading” from a basic to a premium plan for “more accurate assessment of your genetic risk”. Like 23andme, Nucleus has applied the platform business model of commercial datafication to personal health.

Though details about the genetic IQ test itself haven’t been made public (Hachem’s tweet suggested the “tech is still in its early stages” and they would be “rolling this out slowly”), available information about its other tests show that Nucleus Genomics produces polygenic scores for various traits and conditions. Describing polygenic scores as “common genetic scores”, it suggests that its “state-of-the-art algorithms unlock previously unavailable insights into your diseases and traits” to provide “personalized reports tailored to you”.

Polygenic scores underpin claims about a DNA revolution in intelligence research, and the prospects of genetic intelligence testing (including genetic IQ testing of children). Nuclueus’s genetic IQ test therefore translates the promise of algorithmic precision into seemingly precise cognitive screening. The test will treat users as biodata transmitters for algorithmic analysis whose intelligence ratings are a source of value for the company.

Bad science?

The Nucleus IQ test is framed in the language and imagery of high-tech algorithmic accuracy and innovation, but it rests on a controversial history of intelligence testing – particularly the proliferation of the IQ test – that has its roots in twentieth-century eugenics. It’s for this reason other consumer genetics companies, like 23andme, have steered clear of producing intelligence ratings — although it has been possible for users to upload their data to other providers to do so instead.

In 2018 the behaviour geneticist Robert Plomin suggested that genetic IQ tests for children were likely to be developed in the future, with parents using direct-to-consumer tests to predict their children’s mental abilities and make educational choices. Plomin termed this “precision education”, but critics saw it as a sign of the arrival of “personal eugenics” and a forthcoming “genotocracy” where wealthy families could afford IQ-test tech services to maximize their children’s chances, while poorer families could not. More prosaically, there remain significant questions over the underpinning theories, measurement instruments and construct validity of IQ tests, and particularly claims that genetic data can be used to discover the “biological reality” of IQ.

Given existing controversies over genetic intelligence testing, the announcement of Nucleus IQ surfaces once more these longstanding concerns about both the scientific validity of such tests and the ethical implications of using genetic data to calculate complex human capacities.

On the scientific side, critics point out that polygenic scores for things like intelligence are highly confounded by social and environmental factors, making genetic prediction of IQ little better than “junk science” or “snake oil”. This is because polygenic scores can only account for around 5% of the variance in intelligence, often measured in proxies like educational attainment, which suggests that marketing and publicity claims of calculating “genetic IQ” are wildly overinflated.    

Arguments about the value of calculating genetic IQ are characterized by hard hereditarianism, where assertions are made of the innate biological processes that shape qualities like intelligence. However, polygenic scores do not simply capture causal genetic effects; they also capture a wide range of complex environmental effects that may be mistakenly interpreted as biological in origin. This is because complex social traits like intelligence or educational attainment are not purely biological states, but, as Callie Burt argues, social constructions “based on social distinctions inevitably layered on top of other social forces that exist irreducibly in a social matrix”.

On the ethical side, too, genetic IQ tests – like other social and behaviour genetics findings – raise the real dangers of biological fatalism, stigmatization, discrimination, distraction from other ways of understanding or addressing a phenomenon, and the reification of race as a biological category. Findings from educational genomics studies have already been appropriate and misused to support racist arguments about the heritability of intelligence, and there are serious ethical debates about the possibility of using polygenic IQ tests for embryo screening. Even those scientists supportive of using polygenic scores for research into complex traits and outcomes regard the idea of “DNA tests for IQ” as overstated and misleading. The general consensus seems to be that genetic IQ tests are bad science.

But those scientific and ethical shortcomings are not stopping companies like Nucleus Genomics from claiming to provide a world-first commercial DNA test for intelligence – and they are politically bullish about doing so.

Democratizing genetics?

In response to criticisms of the Nucleus IQ test on twitter, CEO Kian Sadeghi wrote a 350-word tweet defending it from accusations that it was a eugenic technology:

Yesterday, @nucleusgenomics announced a closed beta for the first genetic IQ score, Nucleus IQ. Lots of people were curious. Some people said genetic analyses for intelligence will devolve into new eugenics.

We disagree. Eugenics is antithetical to my vision for @nucleusgenomics

Instead of eugenics, he argued, Nucleus Genomics was “democratizing” access to genetic data.

To some extent, describing genetic IQ tests as eugenic may be over-dramatic, compared to the appalling historical record of eugenic extermination and reproductive control in the twentieth century. Consumer IQ tests are clearly not in the same terrain. Nonetheless, there certainly is family resemblance with broadly eugenic forms of hereditarianism, genetic determinism and reductionism, evaluations and ratings of desirability, and actions intended to improve individual capacities.

And if genetic IQ testing for embryo screening or precision-targeted educational interventions followed from innovations like Nucleus IQ, then it would be even harder not to view such technologies as at least bordering on the territory of eugenics — a kind of “flexible eugenics” that mobilizes genetic technologies for individualized interventions and improvements. Nucleus clearly sees big business opportunities in the biotechnological improvement of human health and cognition.

But Sadeghi’s response to criticism also indicated the company taking a particular political position in relation to ongoing ethical concerns about the mis-use of genetic data. Rather than restricting genetic science on the grounds of ethical concern, Sadeghi argued that:

This is about information access and liberty. … Suppressing controversial genetic insights that are prone to abuse and misinterpretation doesn’t prevent that information from being abused and misinterpreted. … We believe history and ideology should not outweigh your right to benefit from technological progress.

In an earlier blog post, he also suggested that “ideological battles have led the public health and medical elite to restrict access to genomic insights and their utility”.

Genetic IQ testing, then, has become linked by Nucleus Genomics to current contests over scientific freedom, in contrast to supposed elite ideological control, which have become heated in some areas of social and behavioural genetics. Here the argument is that science is being censored by scientific elites due to an overemphasis on ethical practice and control over “forbidden topics” and “stigmatizing research”, with scientists having their access to genetic data restricted at the expense of innovation and knowledge.

Nucleus Genomics has therefore positioned itself as a defender of scientific freedom, and a source of democratized genetic knowledge, as a way of deflecting from existing and well-founded concerns over the dangers of hereditarian genetic IQ testing. This political defensiveness around scientific freedom to conduct controversial research is mobilized to make genetic IQ testing technologies seem desirable, acceptable, and non-ideological. Additionally, big tech investors see potential value in them, and Nucleus clearly anticipates a market opportunity for consumer genetic IQ testing. Left unsaid is the actual value of genetic IQ tests for users and customers, or the potential longer-term implications of such (contested) technologies being introduced into other sectors and industries.

This political positioning, backed by investor dollars, raises the danger that ethically risky genetic technologies may become normalized and used to quantify and evaluate human capabilities, despite their documented shortcomings. The example of Nucleus Genomics may also anticipate the expanding use of genetic technologies in sectors like education, as using biological signals to predict outcomes is argued to be scientifically viable, accurate, and objective. Some researchers have already argued that data from direct-to-consumer genetics companies could be used in the future to construct polygenic scores and inform educational policy and teaching.

All of this indicates how the highly contested science of genetic IQ testing is now being brought into the mainstream thanks to tech startups, biotech firms and investors seeking valuable market opportunities, twinned with researchers engaging in ethically-risky experiments under the banner of democratizing access to genetics, in a context where frameworks of scientific and regulatory control are increasingly viewed as ideological impositions on scientific freedom.