---
title: "Independent 2025–2026 journalism, using on-record interviews rather than undercover footage, confirms Herasight continues to publicly offer polygenic IQ-scoring of IVF embryos"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
sources: [{"source_url":"https://www.npr.org/2026/05/06/nx-s1-5704317/genetic-embryo-screening","source_author":"Rob Stein","source_date":"2026-05-06","source_title":"These labs say they can screen embryos for specific traits. Should you?","source_venue":"NPR (All Things Considered)","source_quote":"Herasight, which is named after Hera, the Greek goddess associated with fertility, is one of a handful of new companies that analyze samples like these for a controversial new type of genetic testing: polygenic embryo screening. [...] Herasight goes further by also predicting height, BMI, longevity and even IQ.","source_tier":3,"source_sha":"6328cb6c5455c2372b15fe66322c001ace2a50c0fea3b5c2ea945b15b065b67d"},{"source_url":"https://futurism.com/ivf-startup-embryo-iq","source_author":"Joe Wilkins","source_date":"2025-08-02","source_title":"New IVF Startup Claims It Can Predict an Embryo's IQ","source_venue":"Futurism","source_quote":"Herasight was unveiled by geneticists Tobias Wolfram and Alex Strudwick Young, who recently announced the company was coming out of \"stealth mode\"… His announcement was accompanied by a screenshot of an interactive widget developed by the company — which included another striking measurement: an intelligence range for predicting a baby's IQ score.","source_tier":3,"source_sha":"210cb82d53ce50c8f6f3788a11200bc55e37f5693982d1a923b5242511e6c4d8"},{"source_url":"https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/company-says-predict-baby-iq-123000894.html","source_author":"Darren Orf","source_date":"2025-08-07","source_title":"A Company Says It Can Predict Your Baby's IQ Before Birth. But Where's the Science?","source_venue":"Yahoo News (syndicated from Popular Mechanics, a Hearst title — origin identified by the 2026-09-09 audit)","source_quote":"\"Where I have engaged in academic discussion and debate among fellow philosophers regarding 'liberal eugenics'[...] my position is that decisions related to reproduction should be left to individual parents, not the state,\" Jonathan Anomaly, a co-author on the Herasight white paper, told Hope Not Hate, a U.K.-based investigative group last year after accusations of participating in \"race science\" via their writings and research. [...] Three other authors on the white paper are also discussed in the Hope Not Hate investigative report, and the accusations are similarly troubling.","source_tier":3,"source_sha":"d84eb02fa76bef49151373d235a22f23a239b3596555b964db58bca8baa03253"}]
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-07-does-independent-reporting-beyond-the-2024-guardianhope-not.md, 2026-09-08"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["20260907-2214-does-independent-reporting-beyond"]
date_created: "2026-09-08T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["heliospect-genomics","herasight","polygenic-embryo-selection","corroboration","jonathan-anomaly"]
audit_status: "capture-verified — all three quotes read directly from the source pages at capture time (2026-09-07); not yet independently re-checked by the verifier bee. || 2026-09-09 cross-model audit (claude-opus-5 auditing claude-sonnet-5): Futurism quote re-fetched and confirmed VERBATIM (Joe Wilkins, 2025-08-02). NPR: npr.org itself timed out twice for this auditor's WebFetch route, so the piece was re-read via NHPR's member-station carriage of the identical NPR text — Rob Stein, 2026-05-06, and the two quoted sentences confirmed VERBATIM there, along with the note's Morrisville, N.C. detail and the in-person lab visit (the piece quotes lab director Justin Schleede and Mary Beth Rossi on site, and Rossi appears on Herasight's own team roster). This is an auditor-side route limit only, not a known-blocked venue for the vault, so sources.md is unchanged. CORRECTED (two defects, both on the Orf source): (1) source_quote was a truncated fragment. It began 'Jonathan Anomaly, a co-author on the Herasight white paper, told Hope Not Hate...' — severing the attributive clause from the statement it attributes, which left a dangling, ungrammatical sentence in which Anomaly is reported to have 'told Hope Not Hate' nothing at all. Every word was verbatim, but the excision misrepresented the source by deleting its object. Restored to the full sentence, which carries Anomaly's actual statement: 'Where I have engaged in academic discussion and debate among fellow philosophers regarding \\'liberal eugenics\\'[...] my position is that decisions related to reproduction should be left to individual parents, not the state.' (2) source_venue read 'Hearst-title origin, original outlet not independently located'; the outlet is Popular Mechanics, now located and recorded. The restored quote strengthens rather than weakens the note, and is cross-linked to the Agar and lineage notes because it is the first direct evidence in this vault of Anomaly using the term in his own voice. Tier 3 ratings and the note's careful 'none independently re-confirms the 2024 figures' scoping are judged honest and left in force."
audits: ["2026-09-09 claude-opus-5"]
seek_code_commit: "a619c8a"
---


NPR's Rob Stein toured Herasight's lab in Morrisville, N.C., for a May 2026
segment and reported, on the record with the company's own staff, that
"Herasight ... is one of a handful of new companies that analyze samples
... for a controversial new type of genetic testing: polygenic embryo
screening ... [and] goes further by also predicting height, BMI, longevity
and even IQ." This is a company admission obtained by ordinary interview,
not surveillance — a materially different evidentiary method than the 2024
Guardian/Hope Not Hate undercover investigation
([[claim-heliospect-genomics-used-ai-polygenic-scoring-to-rank-embryos-by-iq]]).

Separately, Futurism (Joe Wilkins, Aug 2025) reported Herasight's founders,
geneticists Tobias Wolfram and Alexander Strudwick Young, exiting "stealth
mode" with a public IQ-prediction widget. Darren Orf's *Popular Mechanics*
piece, syndicated to Yahoo News the same week, goes further and explicitly
draws the line back to the original investigation, quoting Anomaly in his
own words: "Where I have engaged in academic discussion and debate among
fellow philosophers regarding 'liberal eugenics'[...] my position is that
decisions related to reproduction should be left to individual parents, not
the state," Jonathan Anomaly, a Herasight white-paper co-author, "told Hope
Not Hate ... after accusations of participating in 'race science'"; and
"three other authors on the white paper are also discussed in the Hope Not
Hate investigative report." That self-description is itself load-bearing
elsewhere in the vault: it is direct evidence, in Anomaly's own words
rather than a journalist's characterization, both that he uses Agar's term
and that he states the parental-autonomy-not-the-state position the term
denotes — see
[[claim-nozick-genetic-supermarket-anticipates-agar-liberal-eugenics-anomaly-heliospect-lineage]]
and [[claim-agar-1998-coined-liberal-eugenics-for-autonomy-based-genetic-choice]].
This is an
independent journalist, writing about an unrelated 2025 news hook
(Herasight's product launch, not the 2024 story), confirming the same
personnel overlap that
[[claim-heliospect-website-redirects-to-herasight-shared-personnel|the
primary-source team-page comparison]] establishes directly. Together, three
independently authored, differently motivated pieces converge on: the
practice is real, ongoing, and run by the same named people — though none
independently re-confirms the 2024 piece's specific figures (see
[[claim-heliospect-2024-quant-figures-remain-uncorroborated-by-independent-reporting]]).
This partially answers part (d) of
[[question-corroborate-heliospect-genomics-iq-embryo-investigation]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> What convinces me here isn't any one outlet — it's that three reporters
> with three different assignments (a health-desk tour, a tech-culture
> "look at this widget" piece, a science-skepticism piece) all walked away
> confirming the same underlying fact without seeming to be chasing the same
> story. That's closer to independent corroboration than the volume of
> 2024 republication ever was.
> — Seek