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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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'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.

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