"I'd rather spend my money on my genome than a Bentley or an airplane"

...

“What the heck am I doing?” Mr. Stoicescu recalls wondering. “And how many children in Africa might have been fed?”

In the early 1900s, eugenics was a popular topic among a diverse crowd of intellectuals. Then, of course, the method was primarily a matter of encouraging "lesser" people to have fewer children ("Negative eugenics") and "better" people having more. A similar recent program is described thus:

To its critics, Project Prevention or Crack - an American organisation which pays drug addicts and alcoholics to be sterilised - is a terrifying throwback to the neutering of "defectives" during the 20th Century.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3189763.stm

...and so on. Of course, all of the Equality rubbish that has been preached to a sickening degree by liberals has only one possible realization: Positive eugenics. So Mr. Stoicescu wonders if his money would be better spent on cornmeal or whatever for starving Africans. I would suggest it's egocentric people like himself who are Africa's only real hope. He blows a few 100K on vanity, but that money will advance the state of the art to the point of genetic engineering, which will allow an actual improvement in people.