Expecting a contrarian article in 10 to 15 years that says the IVF genome analysis is imperfect and parents have been making incorrect decisions on flawed data.
It only has to be better than random, right?
Scientists say they can read nearly the whole genome of an IVF-created embryo
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Re: Scientists say they can read nearly the whole genome of an IVF-created embryo
#12What’s the choke point of scanning an entire genome? Is it purely computational? Imaging? Biological unknowns?
For IVF embryos, it's the small amount of genetic material which makes accurate sequencing difficult. For standard human whole genome sequencing (WGS), the fastest times are down to five hours[1] (although that is exceptional), for which the imaging was massively parallelized and it seems that the choke point was computational for that particular case (sequencing like this basically multiples the DNA, shreds all the…
Average WGS times for something a person can buy for a couple hundred dollars take a few weeks,
I hadn't realize that we'd actually gotten the $1,000 genome. It was a big point of discussion 20 years ago, but seems to have arrived without the fanfare I would have expected. According to Wikipedia, it's been around for a few years, and claims the X-prize for it was canceled before that since it no longer looked like much of a challenge.
So we sailed right through it and are now pushing an order of magnitude below that. Thanks; I had missed it.
Re: Scientists say they can read nearly the whole genome of an IVF-created embryo
#13Gattaca here we come! \o/ * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca :)
Directly testing people's IQ through say contrived interview questions (ever wondered why people care about leetcode[0]?) will always be more accurate than predicting it from their DNA. It is difficult to say how much of IQ is genetic, but estimates range from 50% to 80%, placing an upper bound on the effectiveness of the exact technique they used in GATTACA. (But, I want to emphasize, the more accurate way of doing it is already being done.)
[0] One objection to calling leetcode an IQ test would be that some people "grind leetcode," as in, practice at it to get better, but did you know that Raven's progressive matrices has a large practice effect? In fact, I might raise your score just by telling you that a lot of the questions are based around XORing the presence of symbols in the pictures. If companies were giving culture-free IQ tests rather than leetcode ones we'd see the exact same pre-interview behaviors, including practicing tasks that don't resemble the job being interviewed for.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Estimates
Re: Scientists say they can read nearly the whole genome of an IVF-created embryo
#14Thinking about the social and political implications of this in the long run. Any society or segment of any society that isn't producing average 120 IQ babies with superior sensory perception, physical strength, dexterity, and so forth, is going to turn itself into a permanent human underclass. Eugenics is here to stay this time.
> Any society or segment of any society that isn't producing average 120 IQ babies with superior sensory perception, physical strength, dexterity, and so forth
Where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.
Re: Scientists say they can read nearly the whole genome of an IVF-created embryo
#15Embryo selection based on genome sequencing is already being done:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/welcome-polygenically-...
Re: Scientists say they can read nearly the whole genome of an IVF-created embryo
#16Thinking about the social and political implications of this in the long run. Any society or segment of any society that isn't producing average 120 IQ babies with superior sensory perception, physical strength, dexterity, and so forth, is going to turn itself into a permanent human underclass. Eugenics is here to stay this time.
That particular underclass problem seems unlikely, relative to how much any 120 IQ human pales in comparison to any synthetic AGI or even domain-expert AI.
The real underclass would be humans vs. machines, which would 10x, 100x or 1000x IQ, perception, strength, dexterity... pretty much any measure.
By the time we can make 120 IQ humans consistently, we'll be able to make 120 IQ machines consistently. And a couple years or perhaps hours after that the 120 IQ machines will be able to make 240 IQ machines and so on.
Re: Scientists say they can read nearly the whole genome of an IVF-created embryo
#17I see a lot of comments underscoring the possible eugenics implication of this, but I am curious as to why everyone always paints it as a negative? Even in our very diversity-conscious institutions we can generally agree that some things are plain bad. You don't want a blind or deaf child. You don't want one with down syndrome or deformities that would just make their life difficult.
I wonder if the high level of opposition to this does not come from us being naturally scared of becoming irrelevant. A society capable of producing disease-less 120 IQ adults would progress faster.
Yes there are a ton of ethical concerns about building a society where hierarchical boundaries find their justification in science, but I see these arguments as myopic. Inequalities have always existed, the only difference is that now nobody would have genetic diseases.
Re: Scientists say they can read nearly the whole genome of an IVF-created embryo
#18I see a lot of comments underscoring the possible eugenics implication of this, but I am curious as to why everyone always paints it as a negative? Even in our very diversity-conscious institutions we can generally agree that some things are plain bad. You don't want a blind or deaf child. You don't want one with down syndrome or deformities that would just make their life difficult. I wonder if the high level of opp…
>now nobody would have genetic diseases.
Nobody with parents who can afford IVF would have genetic diseases. Nobody would rise from an ignoble birth to greatness ever again... or at least not in countries without universal healthcare.
Re: Scientists say they can read nearly the whole genome of an IVF-created embryo
#19I see a lot of comments underscoring the possible eugenics implication of this, but I am curious as to why everyone always paints it as a negative? Even in our very diversity-conscious institutions we can generally agree that some things are plain bad. You don't want a blind or deaf child. You don't want one with down syndrome or deformities that would just make their life difficult. I wonder if the high level of opp…
> now nobody would have genetic diseases. Nobody with parents who can afford IVF would have genetic diseases. Nobody would rise from an ignoble birth to greatness ever again... or at least not in countries without universal healthcare.
Doesn't that just mean that the bar for "greatness" will have risen? Isn't that a net gain?
Re: Scientists say they can read nearly the whole genome of an IVF-created embryo
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
For IVF embryos, it's the small amount of genetic material which makes accurate sequencing difficult. For standard human whole genome sequencing (WGS), the fastest times are down to five hours[1] (although that is exceptional), for which the imaging was massively parallelized and it seems that the choke point was computational for that particular case (sequencing like this basically multiples the DNA, shreds all the…
Average WGS times for something a person can buy for a couple hundred dollars take a few weeks, I hadn't realize that we'd actually gotten the $1,000 genome. It was a big point of discussion 20 years ago, but seems to have arrived without the fanfare I would have expected. According to Wikipedia, it's been around for a few years, and claims the X-prize for it was canceled before that since it no longer looked like mu…
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