US startup charging couples to ‘screen embryos for IQ’
Heliospect’s services were marketed at up to $50,000 for 100 embryos, undercover footage shows
I can't see any problems here. It's not like there's a famous novel about why this is a terrible idea or a movie about it with Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman.
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Hmm. Do we have sufficient information in -- and understanding of -- DNA to reliably predict IQ?
We can definitely screen for some things, genetic diseases and such. I'm just a little skeptical of the our ability to say "this is what the IQ of this embryo will be".
Maybe their whole service doesn't do any testing at all, it just auto sends a reply "We're sorry, we think there is a strong chance your child will inherit genes related to lower than average intelligence." to anyone dumb enough to pay them money.
Back in the early days of the web, thespark.net had a bunch of games and jokes and crap. One of the things they had was an IQ test that was based solely on subtracting points the more questions you answered.
We absolutely do not - geneticist who has worked on neurodevelopment projects
We don’t even know why Turner Syndrome - a disorder of X chromosomes - often leads to neurodevelopment delays. We have hypotheses that still aren’t tested, so anyone claiming to know the genetics of neurodevelopment is grifting you.
We don't have sufficient information to reliably predict IQ, but we do know hundreds of genetic loci associated with intelligence. The overall contribution of these loci is significant.
The polygenic scores predicted 4–7% of intelligence variance in independent samples; another study predicted 10.6% [50]. Thus, a blood sample at birth in these samples predicts intelligence with about the same effect size as parental socioeconomic status, i.e. they do not predict well; neither is of practical use for predicting the intelligence of an individual.
Source. (A review of the subject.)
It's true that the polygenic scores cannot reliably predict that one person will have a higher IQ than another, but that doesn't mean that polygenic screening is useless as a tool for increasing the expected intelligence of one's offspring. People who effectively screen their embryos will, on average, have slightly but significantly smarter children than people who don't. In this way, screening is not qualitatively different from many other parental interventions.
I would use this sort of screening if there was an opportunity to do so. (I don't think it currently justifies resorting to IVF if that is otherwise not necessary, although it would if the effect was larger.)
PRS are useful but not definitive when it comes to phenotype development, as you’ve hinted at, but I take issue with using them for eugenics purposes with the main reason being we do not know the underlying causal mechanism. It is too early to use them with confidence for something like this IMO.
I work with PRS and I am not confident in using them for IVF purposes (that may change when we understand what’s actually going on the proteomics level). I would equate it to something along the line of sports betting with the consequences being eugenics in nature.
I would be worried about causal mechanisms if we were discussing artificially introduced mutations. However, these are naturally present alleles and they would be considered only for the purpose of selecting among otherwise equally viable embryos. In such circumstances, I think that the risk of proceeding without knowing the casual mechanisms is minimal.
IIRC a CCR5 deletion leads to HIV resistance, but the homozygous allele also leads to immune transcription disruptions. I believe there was a Chinese geneticist that deleted CCR5 from twin embryos and got “disappeared” for it, but it remains to be seen what the consequences of that change are (I don’t remember if those embryos were implanted).
I’m of the opinion that we should approach this topic with caution until we know exactly what’s going on and the consequences of said alleles. Hypothetically speaking, imagine being born and chosen by this IQ method only to realize some horrible consequence later like asthma susceptibility in a world with decreasing air quality.
I’d be extremely pissed lmao. I could still find happiness even if I was less intelligent.
There’s another discussion about genetic homogenization that I don’t care to go into atm too.
