Nor does the author understand the genetics of complex diseases. The “implications” claimed below are wrong because high heritable does not mean predictable acr

Nor does the author understand the genetics of complex diseases. The “implications” claimed below are wrong because high heritable does not mean predictable across environments nor is there any genuine hope for selection of embryos for highly polygenic disorders. > . . . prenatal methods will expand to highly heritable complex diseases: autism is 85% heritable, Alzheimer’s risk is 70% heritable, schizophrenia is over 75% heritable, and bipolar disorder is 70% heritable. The implication here is clear: we can eliminate many of these diseases through genetic screening of embryos or selective termination.” There is a naive hope that a “polygenic risk” score of a condition can be predicted for complex diseases in the same way as for Huntington’s disease base in the number of CAG trinucleotide repeats. But polygenic risk scores are built on an assumption of additive and independent effects of DNA variants AND innumerable poorly defined environmental and developmental histories. This is just wishful thinking for most complex diseases. The concordance of diagnoses for schizophrenia among identical twins is no better than about 50%. That fact should give everyone pause. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7465115/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7465115/