Longevity Is Now a Factor When Picking an Embryo for IVF

https://www.wsj.com/health/embryo-ivf-screening-longevity-2b1f096a

by Bluestein • 1 year ago

35 88 1 year ago

wsj.com

CommanderData• 1 year ago

Khan Noonien Singh: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Khan_Noonien_Singh

BJones12• 1 year ago

https://archive.is/qSrH1

guywithahat2• 1 year ago

Finally my favorite movie Gattaca is coming to life.

What will be interesting is there's a lot of recent work to suggest IQ/personality differences can be seen through physiognomy, and it'll be interesting to see if as this tech gets better, the people who go through this process start having similar looking children.

michaelbrave• 1 year ago

I can't remember it's name because I didn't get around to reading it, but there was one sci-fi book where something like Gattaca happened but it happend in a very corporate way, meaning you could buy preset options (wealthy would do custom), everyone became mostly the same height and look etc, or they could tell which preset their parents chose etc, the problem was later on when diseases happened it was catastrophic since the genetics were too much the same.

fensgrim• 1 year ago

Looks like Chemical Garden trilogy by Lauren DeStefano might be a fit - but as it seems to be a cross between typical young adult fiction of 2010's and poorly made romance novel, I do hope there's something less.. pulpy.. with the same premise.

mbg721• 1 year ago

We'll just switch to the Cavendish human.

EA-3167• 1 year ago

Like Gattaca, except there's no evidence that this process yields statistically significant results, never mind the intended, positive results free of complications.

lurk2• 1 year ago

What will be interesting is there's a lot of recent work to suggest IQ/personality differences can be seen through physiognomy

What work are you referring to?

guywithahat2• 1 year ago

People were using AI models to detect different attributes from a picture of their face

https://x.com/hamptonism/status/1929702249439412248

I'm not saying it's very exact, but I think the general premise holds true: there will be certain options we can choose from, and those options will lead to a certain convergence of traits or features. How strong the convergence will be is yet to be seen (if it happens at all)

Teever• 1 year ago

I don't think it'll be straight forward as the Anna Karenina principle.

While a lot of physical characteristics are indicative of some sort of underlying health defect and those defects can have effects on IQ/personality and humans are very evolved to detect these things, that doesn't mean that the absence of these defects through genetic modification will necessarily lead to similar looking people.

For an example of this take a look at the picture of The Martians[0], a group of individuals considered to be astoundingly intelligent. Despite coming from the same time and place and small ethnic group they bear a passing resemblance and many of them look quite different.

Now this doesn't get into the possibility that humans will use genetic modification to impart superficial aesthetic choices on their children that will be subject to the fleeting whims of fashion as we're already seeing with cosmetic surgery and injectable fillers/botox that kind of stuff will be subject to the cyclical nature of fashion/style and not intrinsic to the any sort of physiognomy.

If anything we're likely to see people who look radically different than any traditional expectations of beauty and the traditional correlations between appearance and intelligence will be totally out the window. Sooner or later we'll be able to create people who have feathers instead of hair and someone (probably the kind of person who currently has gauge earrings, split tongues, and eyeball tattoos) will decide that this is what they want for their kids.

There isn't going to be clean mapping between intelligence and someone who has feathers for hair, or purple eyes, or three breasts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)

cjbgkagh10• 1 year ago

I like the accidental eugenics the USSR did by concentrating their scientists in Akademgorodok (Siberia), the kids born there are unusually smart. Similarly in the USA the SATs for collage admissions did end up with more pairings of smart parents.

donsupreme• 1 year ago

straight up Gattaca

Nucleus also provides probability assessments for the embryos’ IQ, height and eye color. Sadeghi said that Nucleus informs customers of the strength of the various predictions. IQ predictions are limited in accuracy, according to the company.

sokoloff2• 1 year ago

Tell me the parents’ IQs and heights and I can give you a prediction of the embryo’s measures for $59.99.

mschuster91• 1 year ago

Doesn't work that way. Both height and IQ have a serious dependence on nutrition of both the mother while pregnant and the offspring during adolescence as well as mental stimulation for the latter, oh and the father's nutrition and both parents' history with drugs and medication also can play part in the genetics and epigenetics of the offspring.

On top of that you have recessive genetic traits as well which means you can get stuff like skin, hair and eye color that "pause" sometimes over generations. Used to be quite a source of infidelity allegations until Mendel's inheritance research, and frankly it's still something that pops up even today.

cannonpr3• 1 year ago

I often find my self conflicted over Gattaca, because I much prefer Ian banks vision of the future, “beauty and intelligence should be a basic human right through technology” yet Gattacas dystopian vision is much more likely what we are going to get thanks to capitalism. Also with imperfect technology, options like these will also do a lot of damage to human genetic variability, till some fun pathogen comes and has words with us over the matter.

colechristensen• 1 year ago

I'm thinking it will be a vaguely more Hyperion vision with different groups and different strategies. After a few centuries some humans which are barely recognizable and some humans who are highly conservative and probably a lot in between.

Basically I think humans taking our genetic code into our own hands intentionally is inevitable and the question shouldn't be whether it should be allowed or not but instead how do we do this wisely and when are we ready for which steps.

cjbgkagh10• 1 year ago

Humanity is getting better at combating pathogens to the point we wouldn't have to rely on genetic diversity for resilience, additionally such treatments could be given to those already born.

It's not like human variability would be lost forever, we can make and keep copies.

Gattaca's core message is that there is no gene for the human spirit, but in reality there probably is, behavior is highly genetic. Also consider that Vincent could have had a heart attack during the mission, that would put his actions into a rather selfish light.

My optimistic view is that an improved understanding of the mechanisms would lead to direct medical interventions, in such a world Vincent would have been able to have his heart properly treated.

I have ME/CFS from a genetic condition and I treat it by suppressing IL-1B cytokines with diet and medication. I was lucky enough to be able to figure this out and I would like more people to have this knowledge.

cannonpr3• 1 year ago

I don’t disagree, and I also have some unique genetic conditions that I won’t get into, they are depressing. However I will say that humanity is peppered with radical choices that did a lot of damage because we “thought” we understood, and we are barely scratching the surface of how life really works, epigenetics alone is barely explored. There likely is no gene for the human soul, there likely is an incredibly complex systemic interaction…

piombisallow• 1 year ago

One more way to scam desperate parents doing IVF out of their money.

smeej11• 1 year ago

Am I the only one who faces a weird sort of existential lump in the pit of my stomach when I think about how, in the world "we're" creating, I never would have made the cut?

I mean, if you'd killed me as an embryo, I'd be every bit as dead today as if you'd killed me yesterday. I can't dissociate my adult self from my embryo self enough to ignore that.

And who knows? Maybe I would have made the cut. Maybe I'm as good as my parents could do. But I can't shake my unease about treating rejected embryos like there aren't adults implicit in them that we're never letting see the light of day.

BugsJustFindMe13• 1 year ago

if you'd killed me as an embryo, I'd be every bit as dead today as if you'd killed me yesterday

You wouldn't have existed in any meaningful definition of "you" if your embryo had been destroyed, so you wouldn't be dead. Being dead and being not here are not the same thing. I've never had children. That doesn't mean my children are dead.

ImJamal8• 1 year ago

Embryos are alive. Can you find an embroyotologist who would deny that?

smeej11• 1 year ago

There is no organism that is genetically your offspring, so no such offspring can have died. Totally true. But I'm just the one organism, from all the way back then until now. When did something so significant happen that I became an "I" that could suddenly be killed?

nathanaldensr• 1 year ago

The movie Gattaca addresses this very topic.

smeej11• 1 year ago

Back when I watched it, I thought it was a dystopian film. I seem to have interpreted it differently than a sizable portion of today's tech elite.

matthest• 1 year ago

I would argue this has more or less been the case for most of history, in a different form.

It used to be that most people died young. If your genes weren't strong enough, disease would've knocked you out before you became a teenager.

It's only relatively recently that we've made it possible for people of all genetic types to survive into adulthood.

smeej11• 1 year ago

It has, but in an accidental way, in a, "Shit happens," sort of way, not in a, "My parents looked at me, decided I was faulty, and never gave me a chance," sort of way.

This is much more akin to the old practice of leaving babies to die by exposure if they seemed sickly/weak, which still turns my stomach.

I think it would even be a different thing to me if we were screening sperm and ova for their genes and only combining the best sets than screening the embryos.

cocoto• 1 year ago

The problem is that you can not ban eugenic tech long term, because the other countries will use this to get better IQ and dominate you.

lm28469• 1 year ago

Genetical predisposition isn't anywhere close to being the bottleneck in term of geopolitical domination, even in "advanced" countries, you'd get much better results by improving education

drjasonharrison• 1 year ago

education, social environment, nutrition, dark and quiet at sleep times, clean air...

Bluestein3• 1 year ago

I could be mistaken, but it's not an either/or.-

What if ... both?

PS. Lots of "exponential" all-or-nothing, intelligence related "arms races" around lately ...

... interesting times.-

logicchains• 1 year ago

Humanity doesn't have anywhere near a rigorous enough understanding of biology to engage in large scale human genetic engineering without risk. It's quite possible the society that dives in headlong will end up making some mistake that renders a large proportion of its population sick or infertile in later life. Population IQ will also matter much less in 5-10 years as AI becomes capable of doing the majority of intellectual labour.

cjbgkagh10• 1 year ago

It's one of those arms race things, and people are already doing this but quietly for obvious reasons.

Similar to putting weapons on drones, it used to be unthinkable and now it's unthinkable not to.

Bluestein3• 1 year ago

and people are already doing this but quietly for obvious reasons.

Heck, for argument, "incels" would argue the females of the species have been doing this forever, at least in very broad strokes.-

mmooss• 1 year ago

Always the techno-anarchist - or ironically, the techno-fascist - dream: Technology is somehow inevitable. But somehow we have prescription controls on drugs, many materials and tools are illegal, nuclear weapons are limited to a few countries.

As a society, we have power if we want to use it. It's never perfect, but it can be very effective. Saying it's impossible is just a means - intentionally or not - of preventing people from using that power.

unstablediffusi• 1 year ago

As a society, we have power if we want to use it

you have no power over China, which is what the GP implies

Solstinox2• 1 year ago

I’ll let them go first. I insist.

We can barely manipulate simple organisms without causing negative second order effects to cascade through our systems.

cjbgkagh10• 1 year ago

It would be a matter of concentrating specific SNPs that are already identifiable in human populations. There is no need to create new SNPs of unknown outcomes. There would be no difference if the SNP was put there through intervention or if it was inherited by a parent. Since these SNPs already exist the outcomes can and are being studied.

potato3732842• 1 year ago

Don't even need to do that. Just engineer out the diseases that drag us down.

Balgair2• 1 year ago

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

Veritasium had a good primer on IQ scores and what they actually mean for your life

TLDW: IQ score seems to really only correlates to being too dumb to be conscripted and effective in war.

Going on Derek's work there, even if other countries do somehow manage to genetically engineer their children for higher IQ scores, and even if they manage to get all the environmental hazards (lead paint, nutrition, quality sleep, etc) out of the way for those children, and even if they don't then do some other draconian nonsense to those kids in the ~19 years until they become productive, then, even then, there seems to be absolutely no guarantee that those kids will go on to do any dominating of other countries in social, political, or military contexts.

Outside of being too dumb to be trusted with a firearm, IQ seems to have no real bearing on measurable life outcomes. As the current science stands, from my understanding of it, it would be incredibly foolish to pursue genetic engineering/breeding as a method of international relations.

ch4s3• 1 year ago

There are some 530 genes associated with intelligence and they are mostly small contributor. There’s also a large environmental component that is poorly understood.

I’m not sure that gene edited super intelligence is in the near future.

smeej11• 1 year ago

Sincere question: Is there any societal change you wouldn't want to survive?

I don't have any trouble saying this is a race I'm fine with "losing" because I refused to play, because the prospect of living in such a world sounds horrible to me.

From my perspective, it's not that different from the reason I don't own a remote bunker anywhere. I wouldn't want to survive a nuclear holocaust, because living in a post-nuclear-holocaust world sounds horrible.

The fact that other people might do things I would find terrible, and that I might rather let them kill me than willingly participate in the world their activity created, seems obvious to me, but I can at least imagine how someone else might see it differently.

Perhaps it's that many things seem worse to me than death?

AStonesThrow2• 1 year ago

Another factor to consider is your clinic's proximity to car bombs and efilists from Reddit

Okay, two factors.

Longevity Is Now a Factor When Picking an Embryo for IVF

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