Investigation hub

The Superbaby Factory


Exposing the secretive company predicting the IQ of wealthy, elite offspring

A HOPE not hate undercover reporter meets a company offering parents a science-fiction like service: screening which IVF embryos will have the highest IQ. We chart its representatives’ support for eugenics and connections to far-right activism. The company strongly rejects the allegations.

In 2020, an academic publisher released a book by an author with an unusual name. Called Creating Future People, it was written by Jonathan Anomaly, a former philosophy teacher at the prestigious American universities of Duke and Penn. In it, he argued for his readers to reconsider their perception of eugenics.

Eugenics, Anomaly wrote, became a “dirty word” after the Nazi euthanasia programme and the forced sterilisations of 20th century America. “Moral grandstanding has become so common in connection with the word that journalists often use ‘eugenics’ to mean something like ‘unjust coercion of innocent parents’,” he said. Anomaly instead provided his preferred definition of eugenics, citing Leonard Darwin, son of the biologist Charles:

“Eugenics is the study of heredity as it may be applied to the betterment, mental and physical, of the human race.”

An undercover investigation by HOPE not hate can reveal that Anomaly’s interest in eugenics is not purely academic. He is involved in a controversial biotech project called PolygenX, which, while operating in stealth mode, offers a remarkable service. It claims to have developed a way for parents pursuing IVF treatment to analyse the genetic data of their embryos and identify which of them will have the highest IQ.

The ethical, practical, and societal implications of this service, known as PGT-P screening (or preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic risk) are seismic. Almost a decade ago, the author Toby Young said PGT-P screening could open the door to “progressive eugenics”. This year, Louise Perry in The Spectator similarly described it as “a new kind of eugenics”. If PolygenX’s service works, that time has now arrived.

PolygenX, which plans to go public in 2025, only acceptsvetted couples as clients, many of whom are wealthy. In late 2023, HOPE not hate’s undercover reporter posed as a potential customer in the process of beginning IVF with his partner, and was quoted a price of $50,000 to use PolygenX. He was referred by Malcolm and Simone,Inside pronatalism. Read more about Malcolm and Simone Collins and pronatalism in our report.
the American pronatalist couple and had several meetings with company leaders. Our infiltrator met Jonathan Anomaly, who is described in one of his books as the company’s co-founder; the CEO Michael Christensen; and Tobias Wolfram, who was introduced as the Chief Science Officer. They told our reporter that at PolygenX, they had invented an extraordinary product.

Inside pronatalism. Read more about Malcolm and Simone Collins and pronatalism in our report.

HOPE not hate made the decision to send an infiltrator into discussions with PolygenX because of concerns that the company was practising a form of eugenics behind closed doors. If a new chapter of eugenics was indeed upon us, we believed that the public has a right to know about it. Later, we became alarmed that some of those affiliated to PolygenX are connected to the worlds of scientific racism and far-right activism. In response to our reporting, representatives of PolygenX said it had cut ties with one of the researchers in its orbit and more generally denied the accusation that it had connections to the far right.

How it works

PolygenX was introduced to our undercover reporter by Malcolm and Simone Collins, a pronatalist couple who founded Pronatalist.org and have gained notoriety through their frequent media appearances in the past two years. At a London lunch meeting in October 2023, Simone pulled out her phone and showed our infiltrator a website labelled PolygenX. It displayed a ranking of each of her frozen embryos on an IQ bell curve graph.

The company takes its name from the term “polygenic”, which refers to traits that can be derived from thousands of genes. Polygenic traits include height or the propensity for illnesses like diabetes. These traits are not heritable in the same way as monogenic — single gene — conditions like cystic fibrosis, which are comparatively easy to identify.

Simone Collins demonstrates PolygenX to our undercover reporter, 28th October 2023

PolygenX’s service offers polygenic embryo screening and is a more advanced statistical analysis of the genomic sequence of fertilised embryos before they are implanted during IVF. In effect, it lets parents — who might typically generate 10 embryos during IVF treatment — select which one will be the likeliest to have certain traits. Of all the traits that PolygenX can identify, IQ was described by Tobias Wolfram to our undercover reporter as “basically the starting point of the company”.

IVF treatment is heavily regulated in the UK. Here, parents are only allowed to select an embryo based on its likelihood of having a severe, life-limiting illness like cystic fibrosis or Tay Sachs. Selecting based on traits unrelated to illness like biological sex, height or IQ is currently not legal in the UK.

PolygenX was incorporated in Sheridan, Wyoming in 2022. Embryo selection is largely unregulated in the US, and several companies have sprung up to provide genetic analysis of embryos for ever longer lists of traits. PolygenX is unique, however, in being one of the few to screen a trait as controversial as IQ.

PolygenX described the steps by which prospective parents would use the service to our undercover reporter:

  • Approach an IVF clinic in a country with less regulation on selecting embryos, such as the US
  • Undergo normal IVF treatment, which involves combining sperm and egg before freezing and analysing the embryos
  • Request the genetic data of these embryos, and deliver it to PolygenX
  • Receive a login to PolygenX’s hidden website that ranks each embryo according to traits like IQ, ADHD, bipolar, biological sex and different forms of cancer
  • Return to the IVF clinic, and ask for the implantation of the desired embryo

In one slide shown to our infiltrator in October 2023, Anomaly demonstrated the PolygenX dashboard which lets parents rank their embryos on IQ. It depicted an interface where customers could input a trait in addition to the number of embryos they had frozen during the IVF process. They could then view the potential gains in IQ scores once their embryos had been analysed by PolygenX, and compare which were highest.

Team PolygenX

Among the more concerning aspects of PolygenX, given its practice of what has been termed “a new kind of eugenics”, is the connection that some of its personnel have to scientific racism or far-right activism.

Jonathan AnomalyJonathan AnomalyFormer philosophy professor, early PolygenX employee (born Beres) is our undercover reporter’s first point of contact with PolygenX. He is an early employee of the company. He regularly appears on podcasts and blogs associated with scientific racism and the wider far right. Anomaly spoke in a panel alongside Simone and Malcolm Collins at the Natalism conference in Austin in 2023. The panel was moderated by Kevin Dolan, an activist in the DezNat far-right Mormon movement, which uses the Fasces as part of its symbol.

Jonathan AnomalyFormer philosophy professor, early PolygenX employee

Anomaly has co-hosted live events for Aporia, the scientific racism website, and his writings have appeared on The Unz Review, a website run by the Holocaust denier Ron Unz. In 2018, Anomaly published an article titled “Defending eugenics” in the peer-reviewed Monash Bioethics Review. In an October 2023 video call with our undercover reporter, he described himself as a “race realist”, referring to the belief that scientific evidence proves racial differences. Although he is American, he spends time in the UK and has appeared on Lotus Eaters, a British far-right media outlet.

When we reached Anomaly for comment, his representative responded that he neither not held nor promoted far-right ideologies. We were told his appearance on Lotus Eaters was for “the furtherance of debate with those who he knew held different views to him”. Anomaly’s representative claimed that he asked Matthew Frost, Aporia’s founder, to remove any material featuring him from the website, as over the course of 2023, he began to disagree with its editorial stance. Anomaly nevertheless hosted a live event for Aporia in New York in February 2024 and many of his podcast appearances remain live on the website. He furthermore reposted four articles from Aporia on his Substack page this year, the most recent being July 22nd 2024. On December 26th 2023, Anomaly reposted an article titled: “The case for race realism.”

Jonathan Anomaly advertised as the guest at a live event in New York for race science outlet Aporia in February 2024

During a call with our undercover reporter in November 2023, Tobias Wolfram was introduced as the Chief Science Officer of PolygenX. Wolfram has been successful in his academic career, and in addition to a doctorate in behavioural genetics from the University of Bielefeld in Germany, holds affiliations with multiple universities, including Oxford, where he is an associate member with the Leverhulme Center for Demographic Science. In 2023, he spoke at the International Society for Intelligence Research, in Berkeley, California and was given an award for the best student presentation. Wolfram was described by Anomaly and PolygenX’s CEO Michael Christensen as the individual doing much of the company’s analysis work.

We can reveal that Wolfram has been a member of the closed Telegram chat of Martin Sellner, the Austrian far-right activist who leads the Identitarian Movement (Identitäre Bewegung). In January 2024, Wolfram posted the anti-immigrant slogan “we were never asked” in the channel, which is closed to members of the public. He posted again in the same chat in April to criticise a leaflet organising a counter-protest against Martin Sellner in Steyregg, Austria.

In response to HOPE no hate’s findings, Wolfram’s representatives told us that he “vehemently denies being associated with the ‘far-right’, rather he considers himself a libertarian”. His representatives furthermore told us that Wolfram was unaware that he had been posting in Martin Sellner’s private chat group on Telegram. They added: “Immediately upon realising that the post was on Mr Sellner’s channel, Mr Wolfram removed it.”

Anomaly demonstrated the PolygenX dashboard which lets parents rank their embryos on IQ, 31st October and 7th November 2023

Heliospect Genomics

Little is known about PolygenX’s founder, Michael Christensen, except that he is a former day trader from Denmark who has taken an interest in genetics. We make no suggestion about his political views or affiliations. According to company documents, PolygenX Research (now known as Genotribe) was registered at a business address in Sheridan, Wyoming. A representative says the company is now dormant.

Another company working on genetics is registered at the same business address. It is called Heliospect Genomics, and has a very small online footprint except for a website that describes it as “a biotech startup at the forefront of genomic prediction”.

Heliospect Genomics is listed on the UK BiobankPolygenX claims to have access to the UK Biobank. Read more about the biobank.
website on a project to “improve genetic risk predictions” for various diseases. The biobank is a resource of genetic data, composed of health, genomic, and intelligence information from 500,000 volunteers. It is an initiative funded in part by the Department of Health and the Wellcome Trust. University researchers and private companies can apply to the UK Biobank for data sets that they can use to understand the secrets of hereditary disease.

PolygenX claims to have access to the UK Biobank. Read more about the biobank.

The biobank publishes a summary about every project it approves. PolygenX’s name does not appear on the UK Biobank’s website. However, on June 9th 2023, a man named Alexandros Giannelis was identified as the principal investigator of a project he was undertaking for Heliospect Genomics. Giannelis requested biobank information to test “advanced techniques on new genetic data”.

Heliospect Genomics, we understand, is the start-up behind PolygenX. We know that Michael Christensen is the CEO and founder of both. A science research website identifies Christensen as the point of contact for Heliospect, and an email from his representative clarified his role as the creator of both entities. PolygenX, a representative says, is a product, and Heliospect, we understand, is an affiliated company.

When our infiltrator first met Jonathan Anomaly in October 2023, he suggested that the UK Biobank had been integral to creating PolygenX. “The UK Biobank is a godsend,” he said. “That’s basically the best thing that's ever happened for this field.”

A week later, when our undercover reporter met the rest of PolygenX’s team, Michael Christensen said the UK Biobank “give access to everyone, even Chinese companies get raw data access”.

When volunteers to the UK Biobank fill out its consent form, they are told their data will be used “to support a diverse range of research intended to improve the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illness, and the promotion of health throughout society”. Volunteers relinquish their rights to bodily samples and give permission for their health records to be stored. Polygenic embryo screening is not legal in the UK, but is in the US. The use of British genetic data in a country where regulations are laxer, we argue, raises ethical concerns about the kind of projects the UK Biobank approves, and to whom it gives sensitive information.

A statement from the UK Biobank said Heliospect had fairly gained access to its data for pre-implantation screening in the US. “This is entirely consistent with our access conditions,” said a representative.

Team Heliospect

HOPE not hate has identified three individuals associated with Heliospect.

Leaked data from Midgård, a Nazi merchandise website, reveals that Giannelis bought Invasion by Ian Stuart Donaldson in August 2020

Alexandros Giannelis, a behavioural geneticist at the University of Minnesota, is one of them. He was also described as a “one of our colleagues” by Anomaly in a call with our undercover reporter in November 2023. When the Nazi music website Midgård was hacked that same year, leaked customer data revealed that Giannelis made two purchases from its shop: Invasion, a book by Ian Stuart Donaldson, founder of the white supremacist group Blood and Honour. He also bought four Nazi propaganda posters. In an email to HOPE not hate, Giannelis confirmed that he had been a research consultant at Heliospect, and has since stepped down.

A letter from a representative of Heliospect said Giannelis was removed after the company “became aware of some allegations about Mr Giannelis’s political affiliations which, if true, were in conflict with the company’s core values”. Giannelis said he denied the allegations, and told us: “I do not sympathise in any way with far right ideologies.”

Spencer Moore, a genetics PhD student at the University of Colorado Boulder, is also involved in Heliospect. In 2022, he travelled to Quito, Ecuador, to address the class of Jonathan Anomaly, who was then academic director at the Centre for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. Spencer Moore took over from Giannelis as the principal investigator on a project making use of UK Biobank data. When reached for comment, he confirmed that he is a lead scientist at Heliospect. Moore, we also discovered, is a member of the private Telegram channel of Aporia, the scientific racism outlet, although he has not to our knowledge posted any messages there. He did not answer our email to him about his membership of the group.

Another affiliate of Heliospect is Curtis Dunkel, a former psychology professor at the University of Western Illinois. He has a history of publishing articles in scientific racism journals like Mankind Quarterly, which is now run by the Human Diversity Foundation. Dunkel has co-authored papers with Emil Kirkegaard, Edward Dutton, and Michael Woodley, whose article claiming that human races could be divided into subspecies was cited by the 2022 Buffalo terrorist who shot dead 10 Black people. Dunkel has also written for Aporia. On his digital CV, Dunkel lists his position as a research consultant at Heliospect Genomics from June 2023 to the present.

In an email to HOPE not hate, Dunkel indicated that he had been approached by Heliospect to work for them. “I was offered a short-term consultancy with the task of developing a personality profile/measure of a child with ADHD,” he said. He justified his collaboration with scientific racists, adding: “I have published in numerous outlets. I viewed it as my obligation to try and present my findings and was conscientious about trying to do my best. Some subjects are sensitive, but this sensitivity reflects their importance.”

Simone and Malcolm Collins and Jonathan Anomaly on a panel moderated by Kevin Dolan at the Natalism conference in Austin in December 2023

Elite clientele and bad science

The notion that humanity can be improved through a combination of biological and technological tinkering has had a positive reception among the American tech elite. “There’s big demand for it among the wealthy already and among the well-connected in Silicon Valley”, Jonathan Anomaly said on the podcast of Louise Perry in June 2023.

In October 2023, Anomaly boasted to an undercover reporter of securing a meeting with Elon Musk in Austin, Texas, and over the course of a three-hour lunch discussed the polygenic screening of embryos. “He thinks it’s cool,” Anomaly said of the encounter, which took place six weeks prior. “I know he supports us.” Anomaly further told our infiltrator in October 2023 that he belonged to the same group chat as Musk and his former partner Claire Boucher, the singer known as Grimes. Anomaly also thanked Boucher in the acknowledgements of his book, Creating Future People.

Neither Boucher nor Musk responded to requests for comment for this report.

Polygenic embryo selection also captured the interest of the pronatalist couple Simone and Malcolm Collins. The couple are clients of PolygenX and have spoken publicly about using the service — without naming the company — for their last two children. Their goal of creating a biologically distinct elite, superior to the rest of humanity with particular focus on intelligence, relies on polygenic screening and embryo selection.

Simone Collins showing our undercover reporter the PolygenX dashboard for her and Malcolm’s embryos in London October 2023

Elitism runs through the entire project. Not only does the high price — $50,000 was quoted to our undercover reporter — indicate that PolygenX caters to the very wealthy. Polygenic scoring itself is a method that, as it stands, works better for some groups than others.

The method, as described above, is made possible by large scale genetic datasets called biobanks. Experts consulted by HOPE not hate tell us that UK Biobank, because its genetic information is primarily drawn from white, wealthy, educated people, is not a fully representative data set. The result of this is that polygenic scoring built on these datasets will perform considerably worse for couples outside this demographic, favouring white couples of specific European descents and further disadvantaging those of other ethnic origins. This is because polygenic scores are not “portable” between populations with different ancestry and environmental factors play a role.

In November 2023, PolygenX made a list of inflated claims and misrepresentations of scientific research in a sales chat with our undercover reporter. In a video call presentation, the company’s CEO Michael Christensen and Tobias Wolfram explained the science behind their product.

One presentation slide claimed that “by adulthood, general intelligence is 60-80% heritable”, which is in the absolute upper range of what scientists in this field argue. The slide referenced four academic papers, only two of which actually supported that claim. One paper did not make a claim for a specific percentage estimate on heritability. Another paper was written by the behavioural geneticist Emily Willoughby at the University of Minnesota. She has received funding from the Institute of Mental Chronometry, which in turn received grants from the Pioneer Fund. But even her paper only estimated the heritability of IQ to be 42%.

Furthermore, Anomaly told our undercover reporter that most of the traits screened by PolygenX — “height and IQ and that sort of thing” — are “continuous and additive traits”. He explained: “The genes aren’t just doing random things. Instead, they’re adding fractional amounts of height or IQ or something like that. They're not also, I don’t know, giving you breast cancer on the side. Evolution doesn't work like that, right? If you had mutations doing really egregious things like that, they’d be selected out pretty quickly.”

However, this isn’t exactly correct. Some of the genetic components that are associated with desirable traits like intelligence also correlated with negative traits or disease modalities such as anorexia.

Eugenics 2.0

Polygenic embryo screening has been described as a form of eugenics by both critics and supporters. Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine at MIT Technology Review, called it “Eugenics 2.0”. New eugenics, neo-eugenics, private eugenics, domestic eugenics, positive eugenics — these are some of the terms that have arisen to describe ways to “improve” human life at the embryonic stage. Ethical issues raised by the practice of eugenics, however, go wider than just the historical cases of murder and forced sterilisations carried out by Nazi Germany.

Jonathan Anomaly arguing on Louise Perry’s podcast that “eugenics” should not be used as a slander term, June 2023.

One of the advocates of this newer definition is PolygenX’s Jonathan Anomaly. He has described polygenic embryo selection as a form of eugenics. In his academic writing he uses the term “liberal eugenics”. He has sought to rehabilitate the practice, arguing it has broad societal benefits.

In his book Creating Future People, Anomaly tries to separate eugenics from its association with the horrors of Nazi Germany by claiming its modern iteration is not coercive. He writes that “criticism of eugenics conflates what Galton and many modern academics in bioethics mean by ‘eugenics’ with how the Nazis misused it”.

Anomaly, however, fails to mention that Francis Galton himself held deeply racist views and his view of eugenics was in no way benign. He defined eugenics as “the science of improving stock”, adding that its purpose was “to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable”. Galton constructed a hierarchy of races in which white people were placed at the top. Galton also believed that the extinction of what he considered “an inferior race” would be positive for society.

More than a century later, Toby Young, the Spectator columnist, has also separated eugenics from state coercion and made the argument that “genetically engineered intelligence” is the best way to facilitate social mobility. When it became available, he proposed offering it “free of charge to parents on low incomes with below-average IQs”.

The practice of embryo selection based on height or IQ is not the same as forced sterilisation or euthanasia. But the service made available by PolygenX and endorsed by Anomaly and Young still relies on the same biological determinism that is the foundation of scientific racism.

The harm of scientific racism and biological determinism more broadly is that it makes socioeconomic inequality seem natural and fixed. Because intelligence is based on genetics, the argument goes, it is unchangeable and therefore not worth addressing through education. Young does not propose economic or social policy to address low incomes, he proposes that we should genetically enhance poor people’s future children. Similarly, in the scientific racism best-seller The Bell Curve, Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein argued that socioeconomic inequality reflected genetic diversity and therefore could not be overcome through policy.

The effect of PolygenX’s own form of eugenics focuses on wealthy elites, which, if the service delivers, would take social stratification to new extremes, exaggerating existing social differences and making them biological. But according to mainstream genetic experts, the service might currently be little more than “snake oil”. Its effects, according to the UCL geneticist Adam Rutherford, are likely going to be imperceptible.

But there is still a danger in PolygenX’s business and the growing customer base to whom it sells the idea that genetics is everything. Through our undercover reporter’s meetings with PolygenX representatives, there is a throughline in how people are seen as not much more than their constituent genetic building blocks. The company and others like it help feed the illusion that human value is primarily genetic.

Update 21 October 2024:

Prior to publication, HOPE not hate contacted the subjects of this article to give them the opportunity to comment. After publication, representatives of Christensen, Wolfram and Anomaly have requested we add the following replies. We publish them below, in addition to relevant context where there are contradictions with either their previous statements or our own reporting.

Jonathan Anomaly states that:

“The characterisation of my work is entirely misconceived - I stand behind what I’ve published, including the idea that we should never use information about group differences to justify discrimination or “scientific racism.” Where I have engaged in academic discussion and debate among fellow philosophers regarding “liberal eugenics” - a term coined by Nicholas Agar, an ethics professor in New Zealand – my position is that decisions related to reproduction should be left to individual parents, not the state. My main paper on this subject does not discuss race at all and is clear that while IQ correlates with good social outcomes, it is neither the only factor that matters nor is it an indication of moral worth.’ “For the avoidance of doubt, Mr Anomaly’s article was republished by The Unz Review without Mr Anomaly’s consent. Mr Anomaly has asked for this material to be removed on numerous occasions. We understand that the article, which was pro-Semitic, was republished in order to provoke the Unz Review’s anti-Semitic followers. There is no relationship between Mr Anomaly and Ron Unz whatsoever.”

We note, however, that there are two articles published on The Unz Review authored by Jonathan Anomaly, one of these was co-authored by Nathan Cofnas who has publicly supported race science views. Both articles state that they were published with the consent of the author.

Tobias Wolfram states that:

“I vehemently deny being associated with the ‘far-right’. I am a scientist who founded the German Association of Humanist Students and am a member of the left-leaning Party of Humanists. As someone who has participated in numerous anti-far-right demonstrations and publicly campaigns on international human rights abuses, I am appalled by the attempt to mischaracterise me as holding far-right views when I have in fact publicly criticised those who espouse them."

“For the avoidance of doubt, Mr Wolfram is not a member of any closed Telegram chat of Martin Sellner as you have incorrectly stated in your article. The ‘private chat group’ to which you refer is a public Telegram channel.”

Whether Wolfram is currently a member of Martin Sellner’s Telegram chat is not known to us but we can confirm that he has published two messages in the channel. One used a common identitarian anti-immigrant phrase (“we were never asked”) and another mocked a counter-protest against Martin Sellner. We also note that Wolfram in earlier communications with us, admitted to having posted in the chat. The chat group is not a channel and requires one to actively join in order to post messages.

Michael Christensen states that:

“My work has been driven by my desire to reduce suffering, having seen close relatives suffer from hereditary conditions such as Alzheimer’s and heart disease. As a small startup, we are dedicated to developing with rigorous ethical and scientific standards to meet the diverse health needs of a broad audience. We hope to grow and scale the product to make it widely accessible.”

A spokesperson for Heliospect said:

“Our work is founded on our core principles of individual autonomy and reducing human suffering. Heliospect is a small start-up developing robust polygenic predictors prior to public launch. It is committed to helping people from all backgrounds to make informed choices about genetically influenced diseases. Our work is undertaken in accordance with all applicable laws and regulations.”