Toby Young Toby Young

There’s nothing neutral about Wikipedia

[iStock] 
issue 31 October 2020

A couple of weeks ago Newsweek ran an article attacking Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, for engaging in a friendly Twitter exchange with me about the coronavirus pandemic. According to the article, I was a ‘eugenics advocate’. How could the apparently respectable industrial designer sully himself in this way? Didn’t he realise I was Britain’s answer to Dr Mengele?

The claim that I’m a ‘eugenics advocate’ isn’t true, obviously. It’s based on a deliberate misreading of an article I wrote in which I said that if it ever becomes possible for couples to cherry-pick embryos in a genetics lab according to which ones are likely to have the highest IQ, that technology should be made available for free on the NHS because otherwise it will enable the rich to give their children an even greater competitive advantage. If ‘eugenics’ is forced sterilisation, what I was proposing was the opposite — free IVF for the poor.

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