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Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

It may do that, but it may not. Many important traits involve huge numbers of genes that have small individual impacts and are mediated by epigenetics. The kinds of edits people are talking about now are single genes that control specific diseases. Even trying to make someone taller is probably out of reach for the near future.

It may aslo become really cheap to do this in the future.

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It almost certainly will become really cheap to do this in the future.

OTOH, selection of embryos, by it's nature, will always be expensive.

I wouldn't on embryo selection remaining expensive forever. The manual processes could eventually be automated if there were enough demand.

I agree that selecting an embryo will become inexpensive.

However, the game will be to select the "best" embryo. This becomes a game of numbers where, on average, the quality of the embryo will be a function of the size the pool of embryos and this will be a function of how much the future parents spend.

Insulin is cheap, too.

This is never a very interesting comment. Older styles of insulin that no one wants to use are dirt cheap. The newer and preferred kind is still under patent, and one can quibble about that but it was very expensive to develop and Eli Lilly & Co. just announced a monthly out of pocket price cap of $35. Other countries have different systems that cap prices, so pharmas try to take profits in the US. It's not a very good system, but it has produced a lot of really impressive drugs in the last 50 years. We can do better of course, but trashing any medical advance with a quip about insulin is just childish and boring.

Slow down, I'm only made of straw here. I'm saying that something being cheap to do/make isn't enough to ensure it's actually affordable equitably.

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