COMPLEX TRAITS

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[Intro]
June 2023.
Approved.
Two words on the form:
complex traits.
[Verse 1]
Half a million people gave blood, scans, and memory,
signed over their records for cancer, hearts, and the common story.
A company filed in the same clean type, same patient tone:
“improve prediction of complex traits.”
No embryos. No home.
No IQ. No sale.
No mothers. No scale.
Just one box: public interest.
And that box let it sail.
[Chorus]
Complex traits — two words on a form.
Half a million donors, a hundred embryos to sort.
No IQ, no price, just “entirely consistent,” said twice.
Page fourteen holds the paper trail; the whole thing reads like ice.
One grant, one line, one archive, one truth.
But there ain’t no page fourteen for a venture round to use.
So the record cuts out, clean as a knife.
And nobody’s found where the line ran live.
[Verse 2]
Eighteen months later, a recorded call:
salesman loose-lipped, leaning in, wanting it all.
“Rank a hundred embryos,” he said, no blush, no pause,
“IQ and the naughty traits folks want because they can’t help asking for laws.”
Height, sex, weight, mental-illness risk, and beauty, he laughed,
“50 grand gets a hundred read” — math on a napkin, fast.
Six IQ points is the lift they claimed.
Five couples in the queue. Babies in frame.
Banned in Britain. Legal in the States.
That’s the split: one border slams, one opens the gate.
[Chorus]
Complex traits — two words on a form.
Half a million donors, a hundred embryos to sort.
No IQ, no price, just “entirely consistent,” said twice.
Page fourteen holds the paper trail; the whole thing reads like ice.
One grant, one line, one archive, one truth.
But there ain’t no page fourteen for a venture round to use.
So the record cuts out, clean as a knife.
And nobody’s found where the line ran live.
[Verse 3]
So who’s watching? Here’s the gap in the wall:
CLIA checks the reading, not what the reading means at all.
No pre-market gate, no hard stop, no flag.
FDA moved in ’24; the court kicked it back.
The medical college put it plain in the minutes:
moved too fast, too thin, too little evidence in it.
Fifty-four percent said, that smells like eugenics again.
Forty percent said, yeah, I’d use it — same pen, different end.
Nobody lied. Nobody hid.
The service exists, and the law still did.
[Bridge — half-time, sparse, piano only]
1927.
Carrie Buck on the stand.
Her lawyer was a friend of the man with the plan.
Paid by the colony that wanted the word made law.
An expert swore feeblemindedness ran in the blood like a flaw.
Then they asked him: traced one case back?
“No, sir.”
Eight thousand Virginians, and the practice stayed a blur
till ’79.
Holmes wrote: three generations is enough.
Signed it in ink.
Called it enough.
[Verse 4]
What buried the old eugenics was a word with teeth:
polygenic — not one gene, but a swarm beneath.
A thousand small effects, too messy to breed, too messy to cut,
the whole design slipping out of the cutter’s hand, shut.
Kay wrote it down in ’93: same goal, no method in sight.
So the patrons said, fine — slower, surer — and lit the fuse with a light.
They funded the molecules, dressed it up in a lab coat’s gloss:
psychobiology, vital processes, then molecular biology across
the annual report.
Twenty-five million spent.
Eighteen Nobels later, the obstacle just got renamed.
The problem stayed. The price got stamped.
[Outro — spoken, cold, over decaying loop]
In 1927 it took a statute,
a colony,
a trial,
and a Supreme Court.
Every stage left paper.
Now it takes one lab director.
And nobody has to be told.