r/genetics • u/bethany_mcguire • 11h ago

Article Optimized Offspring

https://www.noemamag.com/optimized-offspring/

Embryonic gene editing tightens the feedback loop between cultural and biological evolution. The species-level effects remain unclear, but some families are already buying a potential genetic advantage that others can’t.

13 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

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u/Mitochondria95 PhD in genetics/biology 10h ago

Total scam. I do polygenic risk score development and anyone claiming this can (or should) be done is a fraud.

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u/IsaacHasenov 1h ago

Yeah right? The gap between "we can identify slight changes in risk for swathes of genomic information across a population of millions" and "we can tell what your kid is gonna be like from a genomic sequence," is huge and people who don't study genetics don't get this

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u/unblockedlanternhead 8h ago

Does that mean you yourself are scamming people?

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u/Mitochondria95 PhD in genetics/biology 6h ago

Am I selling you something? No.

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u/unblockedlanternhead 5h ago

Well you could. Presumably you do sell your polygenic risk scoring services to someone, right? 

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u/Mitochondria95 PhD in genetics/biology 20m ago

Nope. I do research funded by the NIH.

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u/km1116 Ph.D./Genetics researcher/professor 11h ago

Oh look. Eugenics. 🎉

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u/Ardent_Scholar 2h ago

Eugenics happens every day. PGT-A testing is quite effective at detecting trisomies. PGT-M is used for hereditary diseases screening when parents have a risk of passing on.
Most people don’t think of pre-implantation testing for ailments as a bad thing.

TFMR is also more common than people think.

It’s the selection for desirable qualities that’s iffy. (Not to mention the eugenicist killing and ans sterilizing of ”undesirables” that happened in the past.)

But eugenics itself has gone nowhere.

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u/retsamerol 9h ago

There's so much easier and cheaper ways that already happens without the need for this.

If you look at the data for sports, wealth has been creeping up as a factor across all major sports in the US.

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u/unblockedlanternhead 8h ago

In June, Columbia University researchers reported in a preprint (not yet peer-reviewed) that they had edited early human embryos with what  The New York Times  called “unprecedented accuracy” and far less chromosome damage than earlier CRISPR-Cas9 experiments. The technique, called base editing, isn’t ready for reproductive use yet, according to Dieter Egli, the Columbia geneticist who led the research.

The argument that it’s not ready for reproductive use but is ready to be used in the clinic on people who are already born seems odd to me