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?
Indeed. And it could be worse.
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
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
The world is massively unfair as it is. Would anyone even notice already "privileged" societies becoming a little bit more privileged? Who knows, maybe our IQ 120 overlords will be kind to make the tech available for everyone else.
A 120 average IQ population would run circles around a 100 average IQ population, even starting from a much lower position. Of course, there's still the question of whether society is organized such that people of exceptional talent rise to power, and whether they have the incentive to do great things. My main concern isn't the tech being inaccessible to poorer people or countries. International intellectual property…
A 120 average IQ population would be normalized to a 100 average IQ population.
Re: Scientists say they can read nearly the whole genome of an IVF-created embryo
#43Expecting 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.
The error rate for sequencing is significant and can easily lead to incorrect assumptions + decisions,
> The average error rate determined was 0.24 ± 0.06% per base and the percentage of mutated sequences was found to be 6.4 ± 1.24%.
Re: Scientists say they can read nearly the whole genome of an IVF-created embryo
#44Impressive study, kudos to the bioinformaticians who did this!
This could be an option for parents with a genetic condition who don’t want to pass it on. In terms of gattaca style super people (which I find quite repugnant) the recombination events are still random at the end of the day, so you’d have to screen quite a few embryos and there would be trade-offs. If you were really serious about it, the process would start with selecting partners based on their genetic fitness, and also using young fathers.
Re: Scientists say they can read nearly the whole genome of an IVF-created embryo
#45Expecting 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.
The error rate for sequencing is significant and can easily lead to incorrect assumptions + decisions, > The average error rate determined was 0.24 ± 0.06% per base and the percentage of mutated sequences was found to be 6.4 ± 1.24%. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-29325-6
Won't matter for highly polygenic traits. For monogenetic disorders like Tay-Sachs, it will provide another line of defence along with conventional pre-implantation screening and pre-natal screening.
Re: Scientists say they can read nearly the whole genome of an IVF-created embryo
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
A 120 average IQ population would run circles around a 100 average IQ population, even starting from a much lower position. Of course, there's still the question of whether society is organized such that people of exceptional talent rise to power, and whether they have the incentive to do great things. My main concern isn't the tech being inaccessible to poorer people or countries. International intellectual property…
A 120 average IQ population would be normalized to a 100 average IQ population.
Is this a joke? Yes, by definition an IQ test is normalized to 100 for the population it's targeted for. But that doesn't mean that you can't compare intelligence across different populations, by not doing that normalization.
Re: Scientists say they can read nearly the whole genome of an IVF-created embryo
#47Impressive study, kudos to the bioinformaticians who did this! This could be an option for parents with a genetic condition who don’t want to pass it on. In terms of gattaca style super people (which I find quite repugnant) the recombination events are still random at the end of the day, so you’d have to screen quite a few embryos and there would be trade-offs. If you were really serious about it, the process would s…
This could be an option for parents with a genetic condition who don’t want to pass it on.
Most of the genetic disorders we know about can already be screened for (those that involve a single gene).
This opens the door for polygenic screening but the underlying patterns to screen for are, in most cases, only weakly understood. We’d need to do a lot more research on adults with these diseases to get to the point where we can select against them in embryos.
On top of that the amount of selection we can do is limited by the number of embryos to choose between. In many cases that’s a very small number.
Re: Scientists say they can read nearly the whole genome of an IVF-created embryo
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
A 120 average IQ population would be normalized to a 100 average IQ population.
Is this a joke? Yes, by definition an IQ test is normalized to 100 for the population it's targeted for. But that doesn't mean that you can't compare intelligence across different populations, by not doing that normalization.
Average IQ will always be 100, but 100 today is not the same as 100 50 years ago. Renormalization is about 3 points per decade, so you have to take that into account when you compare IQ results across longer time spans.
So a person that would have scored '100' on an IQ test 50 years ago would be expected to score about 85 on a test administered today. Note that I'm not a fan of collapsing everything about human intelligence to a single number, but if you are going to use that number then you at least should be aware of how it is defined and how it develops over time.
Re: Scientists say they can read nearly the whole genome of an IVF-created embryo
#49I 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…
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Re: Scientists say they can read nearly the whole genome of an IVF-created embryo
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for your response! So is it true to say every genome could be sequenced, assuming time and money isn’t an issue?
Starting material is a huge problem. You need at least 50ng of DNA for an Illumina sequencing run, usually more if you want to sequence ultra deep, which you will need for whole genome sequencing. For PCR you need at least 0.1ng (usually higher) of DNA. But a single cell has about 80 pg of DNA. So you need to amplify the DNA several orders of magnitude before you can apply standard PCR. Several approaches can solve t…
The most interesting idea from the article, that was new to me, was using larger samples available from each parent, to augment and guide the analysis of the small amount of material available from the embryo. Obvious idea after you hear it, but very clever nonetheless.