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Yesterday, JG Vibes reported that "A new state funded genetic engineering project at the Beijing Genomics Institute is storing DNA from 2,000 different people who they believe are some of the smartest people in the world."

Excerpt:

One of the stated goals of this project is to figure out how to genetically engineer babies so their IQ’s could be raised by 5-15  points, and they would expect this increase to be possible every single generation.

The Beijing Genomics Institute is one of the largest laboratories of its kind in the world, and is responsible for a long list of genetic projects.  This collection of genius DNA could be one of their most ambitious projects yet.

Vice was able to track down one of the DNA donors to ask him a few questions about his involvement in the experiment. His name is Geoffrey Miller, and he is an evolutionary psychologist and lecturer at NYU.

When asked about the history of eugenics in China, the donor replied by saying:

“As soon as Deng Xiaoping took power in the late 70s, he took the whole focus of the Chinese government from trying to manage the economy, to trying to manage the quality and quantity of people. In the 90s, they started to do widespread prenatal testing for birth defects with ultrasound, and more recently, they’ve spent a lot of money researching human genetics to figure out which genes make people smarter.”

 In an article of his own he celebrated eugenics saying that:

Chinese eugenics will quickly become even more effective, given its massive investment in genomic research on human mental and physical traits. BGI-Shenzhen employs more than 4,000 researchers. It has far more “next-generation” DNA sequencers that anywhere else in the world, and is sequencing more than 50,000 genomes per year.

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