US startup charging couples to 'screen embryos for IQ' | Hacker News Reader

US startup charging couples to 'screen embryos for IQ'

theguardian.com

48 pointscaust1c46 comments

My embryos were one of the early participants in this startup (at a vastly higher sum haha). My wife lets me try out some of these things for a laugh. In our case, our ethnic backgrounds did not lend themselves well to their program (you’ve got to be well represented in the UK Biobank). But it was good fun.

Ultimately, we’ve still got to feed these children and teach them and raise them to adulthood and I look forward to doing that. It’s nice to have selected from the higher end of the bell curve available to the combination of my wife’s and my DNA.

My genome is public and my parents and siblings have theirs too. My hope is that eventually my genetic group will be so available that the data processing will be readily available to all.

In the future, one could imagine my descendants being myopia-free because the ones who were chosen were so. I look forward to the future of humanity.

I'm not sure there's really going to be any improvement at all in their descendants, because I really doubt the company is that aggressive.

How many embryos did they go through? Much of the genome doesn't run on Punnett squares, and even in the parts that do, recessive genes can actually do things.

If you’re young you can produce 20+ eggs per run. Post fertilization, you can have 15+ if lucky. Their model then places them on a curve based on parental genomes. That is, given these parents are these the children most likely to be high IQ or not.

The usefulness of that is up to you. The model is black box and you may never know, it’s true.

Okay then that's pretty much a single-generation effect in practice.

A lot of people don't understand that by the early to mid 1930s it was realized that the "propaganda version" of eugenics was not going to work, and if sterilization was going to be your tool, it would have to continue forever, and would need to happen to quite a lot of people.

Many geneticists said something like, "okay, then expand the programs".

Yeah, if everything undesirable was ruled by a limited number of "garbage" recessives that never did anything on their own, and you could more or less track traits with Punnett squares (or even fuzzier multi-gene threshold charts) then maybe it would work, but it doesn't.

Assortive mating of high intelligence people and/or continual, quite large scale sterilization of people with GWAS-rated "bad" genes would work, but it's not what a single-generation-only use of this company does.

I don’t think the intention is to hurt other people - forced sterilization or any of these things. The intention is probably what parents like me feel: we want to give our kids the best shot at life. And I hope that my children will want to give their kids the best shot at life and having tools like this allows such people the freedom to do so at each generation. I think lots of people will choose this once cost is driven to the floor.

I think the advent of these tools will allow us to master random chance. We need not have women go through 9 months of pregnancy with an unviable foetus or bring to term children who will have terrible congenital conditions that they will have to live with.

Perhaps with the advent of artificial wombs, gametogenesis, and advanced whole-genome sequencing of embryos we could even master time, and reverse our present decline in fertility rates. But that's sci-fi. What we have today is already amazing, and I hope the good it has done my wife and me is available to all as costs drop and the technology becomes universal.

EDIT: Just to clarify since I don't want to get stuck in a back and forth: When I said I'm excited for humanity I did not mean to "clean up the gene pool" or "fix the gene pool" or anything like that that the child comment is referring to. I just meant that people like me could choose for our children that they be born without a random set of conditions. Others, including my children (should they choose otherwise from me), are free to do as they wish, though I would hope that they would choose like I do.

Well, yes, but the old "clean up the gene pool" propaganda wasn't ever going to work, and it's not going to work on a practical level now. Gene pool stays almost as bad as it always was, and each generation has to put in active effort (with selection systems like this, and assortive mating) to manage the actually expressed genes of the next generation.

Fixing the gene pool in any reasonable amount of time would require gene editing and genome designing tech that I wouldn't even know how to start researching.

You have a very optimistic view on eugenics in practice

I do, partly because my wife and I are beneficiaries of it already. We had our genomes available in the first place because our embryos are likely to grow into children with congenital conditions (my wife and I are carriers) and pre-implantation testing is what has enabled us to dodge the high-likelihood errors.

Walk into an obstetrics clinic in San Francisco and you’ll find pamphlets for https://www.natera.com/womens-health/spectrum-preimplantatio... there. Many parents like us will have children that are free of conditions the parents carry because of artificial genetic selection.

This is a form of survivor bias.

The eugenics question aside, Natera is an awful, scammy business:

https://zlk.com/press/ntra-class-action-learn-about-the-nate...

https://hindenburgresearch.com/natera/

https://www.classaction.org/news/class-action-alleges-custom...

Oh, interesting. We used a different service. Glad we dodged that. Thank you.

EDIT: Though, on reading, it appears that the 'scam' in question is that they received prior authorization from insurers by using doctors' credentials. The service itself works as-is.

All of our stuff is just straight up medical expenses out of our bank account. No insurer is involved in our use of IVF or PGT since we just use concierge care. Insurance-based care is probably the best way for folks to get it affordably right now, but if you have the money you definitely want to be getting concierge service: no delays and no one between you and the person providing you the service.

Everyone has an optimistic view of eugenics in practice when it comes to mate selection. How is embryo selection any different?

The difference is selecting for or against specific alleles vs playing the 50-50 haploid game.

Some of us think nurture matters more than nature, too.

In IQ? Assuming reasonable training, nutrition, and lack of brain damage? How?

I thought myopia has a significant environmental component, eg doing most of our development indoors instead of outside in bright sunlight?

Myopia is considered a highly heritable condition. See sources 12-17 on this paper as a starting point https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8947159/#B12-childr...

That does not mean that there is no environmental factor, but it does mean there is a genetic factor.

I'm not sure how well incentivized these organizations are to correctly use the GWAS data vs just appear to do something and then take your money.

Assortive mating and then maybe screening for stuff like Tay-Sachs and autism would for sure be cheaper (assuming there's not backlash against those screenings too...)

There absolutely is backlash against screening for autism, as absurd as that is.

It's not absurd, once you remember that autistic people are human beings with feelings.

Edit: Sort of shocked that I am having to spell this out to all the "but embryos..." posters, but the backlash is coming from autistic human people with feelings. I was not insinuating some anti abortion sentiment.

Yes, but practically speaking if you constrain to the set of people who would go through with assortive mating in today's society, AND are high IQ (and don't think it's a fluke, i.e. they think it's heritable), AND have no relatives that are autistic, AND aren't related to certain Jewish populations, how many candidates are you going to have left?

And I'm not talking about diagnosed autism either, e.g. do you have/did you have a weird uncle?

Edit: uh, the Jewish part's for Tay-Sachs and some other traits, that should have been obvious from the "certain Jewish populations" part.

Sure, but embryos are not.

so are people with any other mental or physical abnormalities. embryos and fetuses are not people, however - they're just bundles of cells ;)

policing human reproduction at embryo stage is absurd in the world where abortion is legal and acceptable for any reason or no reason at all.

Well I'm autistic myself, so...

I am a diabetic. It doesn't make me a worse person, but it does make my life more difficult. If I had the ability to screen for diabetes for my child, I would do so. Because the fewer things that make my child's life harder, the better.

Same thing.

Being a woman is objectively harder in America than being a man is. Would you screen for that?

That's disputable, but it would be a really bad idea for obvious reasons either way. Think the incel problem is bad now?

You're making an argument just to make an argument. Being a woman has both positives and negatives; there's tradeoffs. The same is not true of being a diabetic. My guess would be that most people believe there are very few benefits to being autistic to offset the negatives.

The danish eugenicized nearly 100% of downs folks with these methods (which state requires testing wise).

I wonder if it's similar to the deaf community's outcry against cochlear implants? People love their subcultures; seeing new medical technology wipe out their culture probably feels like genocide[0] to them (even if the majority population perceives it as a good thing).

[0] One of the UN-recognized forms is "preventing births within a population"

That and the fact that in many cases, the symptoms are very mild, and the problem could be reasonably seen to actually lie in the society's sometimes really far-reaching demands for homogenity. And extreme homogenity is bad for innovation.

It might very well be that a double-digit percentage of the population has a some sort of neurodevelopmental disorder[1], and the extermination of such a lot of unborn people is going to be a considerable burden for industrialized countries already struggling with low birthrates, and being totally unprecented, may lead into all kinds of unintended consequences.

1) https://dceg.cancer.gov/about/diversity-inclusion/inclusivit...

No it's not, even with only 4 embryos to select you'd generally expect at least one to be fine.

What business is it of the government what parents choose to screen for? Even more pointedly, how can one support elective abortion and not support genetic screening for whatever the parents want to screen for?

Note: The following is for a world where genetic screen is cheap and can screen for basically anything that is influenced by genetics. That's way more than we can do now, so if your question is about whether it should be the government's business now then never mind. :-)

It's not clear that it makes sense to compare abortion policy and genetic screening policy. People consider abortion to control the number of children they produce or the timing of their production of children, whereas they would use genetic screening to control the types of children they produce.

As for why the government might have an interest in what people can screen for, consider what happens if people start screening for aesthetic reasons. That could be strongly influence by fashion.

You could get a generation where most children were selected for some specific body properties because that's what some big star had. Often bodily features favored by fashion aren't actually good for the person who has them.

For example suppose there we have a few years where extremely thin people became the fashion rage, and people who want children during that time start screening for babies that will be prone to anorexia or other eating disorders.

I can see the government having a legitimate interest in shutting that down.

> As for why the government might have an interest in what people can screen for, consider what happens if people start screening for aesthetic reasons. That could be strongly influence by fashion.

I don't think the government should have much say in people's fashion or aesthetic choices either. I'm sure that eventually designer babies will be a thing and when it happens parents will follow fads, but fads will come and go. A generation or two of more skinny people isn't going to be a problem as long as those people can continue to reproduce and odds are good that we're going to get even better at helping people have children when it's hard for them too.

The vast majority of parents will always favor having healthy and beautiful children no matter how fashionable sickly looking people becomes.

The government's interest wouldn't be in the fashion choice. It would be in how the fashion choices are implemented.

A generation or two of skinny people who are skinny because their parents used screening to only have children who have naturally thin body types should be fine from the government's point of view.

A generation or two of skinny people who have naturally average or heavy body types but are skinny because they have eating disorders which result in them eating much less than they need to remain healthy should be of concern to the government. It could cause serious problems for the health care system.

Ideally the data would just be openly shared with the parents, and they could see the provided analysis, do a separate analysis themselves, use open source tools, or have a separate company do the analysis. Then it's just up to the parents to select the DNA they want.

High iq people aren’t smart enough to reproduce, so this might not work out in the long run.

Eugenics and HN. Name a more classic combination.

Reminds me of the idiocracy intro. All people think about is getting more, until they can no longer have it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZ0ZUy7P3E

> [Dr. Jonathan] Anomaly is a well-known figure in a growing transatlantic movement that promotes development of genetic selection and enhancement tools.

Nominative determinism is real.

Gataca was a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual.

Torment nexus theory of startup founders.

Gattaca wasn't futuristic at all; it was obviously a commentary, and condemnation, of historical racism and prejudice.

Yes it was a cautionary tale, but not about the technology, but about the role of empathy and the human spirit.

The actual technology of Gattaca has already started 50 years ago with the first "test tube babies" and IVF treatments. You get a "optical selection" of the most well developed blastocysts, checking for symmetry, growth rates, and other biomarkers, without even resorting to DNA sequencing selection.

It will absolutely make the world a better place long term - all of our children can be genetically "the best of us", according to various criteria. I'm all for it.

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