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DNA Blueprint for Fetus Built Using Samples From Parents

30 points by rkaplan 14y ago

aaronbrethorst 14y ago
Gattaca: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
- nitrogen 14y ago
  And eventually: https://xkcd.com/1058/ https://xkcd.com/1058/ (fetus grown from 100% synthesized DNA sequence).
  - a_bonobo 14y ago
    What annoys me the most in that comic is that a human genome is around 6- 8 gigabytes on your hard-disk (uncompressed), e-mailing that would be terrible!
- cjbprime 14y ago
  I'm not sure how serious you're being. Assuming full seriousness: In Gattaca, parents somehow got to choose between thousands of potential embryos to maximize chosen traits. This is not biologically plausible; even in IVF, you only get to choose between a few embryos, so you could never have anything like as much control over abilities and health as we saw in Gattaca. The most realistic use of embryo selection is so that you could simply make sure that -- for diseases where you're a carrier and had a 50/50 chance of passing them on to your children -- you choose the embryos without the pathogenic mutation. In this new paper's technique, you just get an abort/don't abort decision over your fetus after seeing what is probably its genetic sequence. We already give parents this decision via amniocentesis. It seems unlikely that people will attempt to go to great lengths to get "the perfect" fetus this way, because one fetus at a time doesn't give you many options to choose between. More likely, we'll just move from "sometimes parents abort fetuses if they're going to have Down's or some other grave disease" to "sometimes parents abort fetuses if they're going to have a serious genetic disease". This doesn't bother me much, nor does it seem to have much of anything in common with Gattaca.
  - shard 14y ago
    Well a woman is born with 1-2 million immature eggs. Imagine harvesting a few hundred thousand, maturing them, and fertilizing them. This is the part we haven't figured out yet.
tantalor 14y ago
98% accuracy? I'm afraid you're going to have to do a lot better than that, humans and chimps have 94% identical DNA[1] and they're 5-7 million years apart[2]. 98% might as well be any two humans. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee-human_last_common_ancestor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee-human_last_common_an...

30 points by rkaplan 14y ago

aaronbrethorst 14y ago

Gattaca: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca

nitrogen 14y ago
And eventually: https://xkcd.com/1058/ https://xkcd.com/1058/ (fetus grown from 100% synthesized DNA sequence).
- a_bonobo 14y ago
  What annoys me the most in that comic is that a human genome is around 6- 8 gigabytes on your hard-disk (uncompressed), e-mailing that would be terrible!
cjbprime 14y ago
I'm not sure how serious you're being. Assuming full seriousness: In Gattaca, parents somehow got to choose between thousands of potential embryos to maximize chosen traits. This is not biologically plausible; even in IVF, you only get to choose between a few embryos, so you could never have anything like as much control over abilities and health as we saw in Gattaca. The most realistic use of embryo selection is so that you could simply make sure that -- for diseases where you're a carrier and had a 50/50 chance of passing them on to your children -- you choose the embryos without the pathogenic mutation. In this new paper's technique, you just get an abort/don't abort decision over your fetus after seeing what is probably its genetic sequence. We already give parents this decision via amniocentesis. It seems unlikely that people will attempt to go to great lengths to get "the perfect" fetus this way, because one fetus at a time doesn't give you many options to choose between. More likely, we'll just move from "sometimes parents abort fetuses if they're going to have Down's or some other grave disease" to "sometimes parents abort fetuses if they're going to have a serious genetic disease". This doesn't bother me much, nor does it seem to have much of anything in common with Gattaca.
- shard 14y ago
  Well a woman is born with 1-2 million immature eggs. Imagine harvesting a few hundred thousand, maturing them, and fertilizing them. This is the part we haven't figured out yet.

tantalor 14y ago

98% accuracy? I'm afraid you're going to have to do a lot better than that, humans and chimps have 94% identical DNA[1] and they're 5-7 million years apart[2]. 98% might as well be any two humans. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee-human_last_common_ancestor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee-human_last_common_an...