Welcome Polygenically Screened Babies

What extraordinarily agonizing choices this could bring to parents, like

"We forecast that this egg will have a 9 point higher IQ but a 14% greater chance of Type 1 Diabetes. That egg will have a 14 point lower IQ but is 30% less likely to get the kind of coronary disease that your father died of."

At least Sophie's choice was simple. There's something to be said for making such decisions the old fashioned way, while overcome with lust.

It might sound depressingly fatalistic, but I suspect designer babies by mechanisms like this are inevitable.

After all, once a means of improving IQ/health/height/whatever is available, it only takes one country to refuse to ban it and what are the other countries going to do - let that country run away with the prize?

There are few examples where the international community has managed such a feat, and many examples where they haven't.

From the fourth paragraph in the article from “ivfbabble” linked at the top of the article:

“Those at the forefront of science around childbirth still face major ethical questions and arguments. We do not seem to have learned to trust our scientists.”

An author should not be asking the public to trust scientists. Scientific results should stand on their own or not at all.

For what it’s worth, the very existence of the author (and by extension, the article) shows that IVF meets this criteria.

Sorry for the soapbox, but I’ll still show up the next time anybody suggests I should “trust science” or even worse, uses the term “settled science”. Both terms are fundamentally incompatible with the scientific method.

I’m not familiar with the term “Polygenic Screening” and couldn’t find a clear description in the article.

For anyone else like me, this Wikipedia article describes what a polygenic score is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygenic_score

As someone with schizophrenia I am disappointed to read all the negative comments, probably coming from people who don't have to bear this horrible disease. I've already decided that the only way I'll ever have kids is through some sort of genetic screening process. I know many other people with schizophrenia online who also purposely will never have kids because they don't want to pass the disorder down.

In my case it's definitely genetic. I've taken 23andme, run my data through Promethease and I have a ton of genes that put me at high risk of the disorder.

I don't give a shit about your high IQ designer baby, just at least give me the option of having a kid before all the pearl clutchers take it away.

The thought experiment of asking hypoethetically what technology, if another culture developed it, would be we forced to destroy them to survive if they did, seems useful here. Nuclear weapons have certainly almost been one and may still be. Quantum-enabled AI is probably another.

Human super intelligence may only be tolerated right now because it is so rare it doesn't scale. Even large networks of 140+ IQ people (who were raised as kids together in gifted programs and went to the same universities) have probably not been that dangerous. Or either they are and smart enough to conceal it, or we are only seeing the effort come to fruition now, where the first formal cohorts of that system are just now reaching their 50's. (https://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/509412/History-of-G...)

But if you accept the IQ model at face value, an ML-selected hyperintelligent master race seems like something our species might wisely target for pruning.

IVF does not really produce as many viable embryos as to perform some extra fine choices among them. Unless the future parents are really, really young.

Welcome to the brave new world...

Interesting. So I'm over a std dev smarter than either parent and 6" taller than expected. Why can't embryos be screened for "Einsteins"? Anti-intellectuals gonna hate? Most ethical concerns apart from sabotaging an individual's genes are nervous-nelly bullshit. "Designer babies" hell yes. Every chance in life.