Rémy Furrer, PhD and Gabriel Lázaro-Muñoz, PhD, JD of the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School recently coauthored a paper with Shai Carmi, PhD and Todd Lencz, PhD. Their commentary titled “Nurtured Genetics: Prenatal Testing and the Anchoring of Genetic Expectancies” was published in the American Journal of Bioethics. They present a hypothesis suggesting that parents who receive scores for their children’s cognitive/behavioral genetic predispositions (e.g., IQ, educational attainment), may end up shaping their children’s environment on the basis of these scores, in ways that would make these genetic predictions come true – they call this the “nurtured genetics effect”. Dr. Furrer says,

"Suppose parents receive a genetic score informing them that their future child's IQ percentile is lower or higher than the general population, parents are likely to want to test whether that score is true, in doing so they may place their child into or away from activities conducive to making the genetic score come true regardless of the child’s actual genetics. If our nurtured genetics hypothesis is revealed to be true it would raise additional ethical implications and practical limitations for the use of polygenic scores."

Read the full text on American Journal of Bioethics.