If You're So Smart, How Come You Can't ...?

DNA scientists believe they are close to manipulating genes to boost the intelligence of children by as much as 20 IQ points.

If a certain pill could make you suddenly and permanently smarter, would you take it?

You'll probably never have to decide that, because no such Flowers-for-Algernon pill exists, and, as far as we know, none is in the works.

But what's definitely under study is how to increase the IQ of our yet unborn children. This is more potential fruit from cracking the code of the human genome, which scientists have done in recent years. We're not yet at the place where we can customize our offspring in terms of how high their IQs will be, but there is significant research underway toward that goal. At BGI Shenzhen, China's top biotech institute and home to some of the best DNA-sequencing machines in the world, Zhau Bowen -- a high-IQ prodigy himself -- is using those machines to crack the code for intelligence. He and his team expect that, within a decade, they'll be able to boost the IQs of children by as much as 20 points. "In theory," says John Bohannon, writing about this for Wired magazine,...