Choosing embryos for IQ, height and hair colour. By Angus Dalton in the SMH.
Companies are now offering genetic tests for choosing between embryos in IVF:
One of the companies offering the service, Nucleus Genomics, recently papered posters around New York spruiking slogans including “Have a smarter baby” and promoting a site that urges would-be parents to “preview” their future child.
The company offers a US$30,000 ($44,712) program that screens 20 embryos for 2000 traits and conditions, including eye colour, risk of acne, left-handedness and baldness.
Clients are served a menu comparing their embryos’ predicted height, hair colour, IQ and risk of heart disease. …
An Australian couple working with Herasight overseas – who this masthead has agreed not to identify to protect their privacy – said they planned to have 10 children and would test between 60 and 80 embryos. Along with screening for breast cancer risk, they will prioritise the embryos deemed to have a better chance of good health and higher intelligence, in the hope that it will make raising and homeschooling their many future children easier. …
Associate Professor Alex Polyakov from the University of Melbourne supplies the necessary cautions, noting of course that environment matters too:
The testing can’t guarantee a certain level of IQ or height, he said, partly because DNA isn’t the only thing that governs the people we become.
Lifestyle factors, such as diet, home life, stress, exposure to cigarette smoke and pollution, exert a significant influence on which genes are “turned on” or not. The powerful influence our environment exerts on gene expression is called “epigenetics”, and it’s something polygenic testing can’t account for.
The genetic databases the risk scores rely on are mostly from Europeans, so the tests are even less accurate – and for some traits, all but useless – for people of non-European ancestry. …
How much difference does it make?
[Genetic statistician Professor Shai Carmi, Hebrew University of Jerusalem] co-led a 2019 study that found polygenic risk scoring could, at best, lead to a two to three point bump in IQ if you had between five and 10 embryos to choose from.
He now believes an increase of four to five points may be possible after advances in genetic science in the years since; Herasight’s research (which hasn’t been peer-reviewed or published) claiming an 8.5 point improvement seemed reasonable, but needed independent confirmation before it could be trusted, he said.
An average height gain of 3.5 centimetres was also theoretically possible in Europeans of perfect reproductive health, he said, but in practice these gains would probably be less impressive and subject to huge uncertainty.
An AI will unravel our genetic code faster, so this technology will improve, fast. The future of Elois and Morlocks is nearly upon us.
Unrelated, I’m sure:
