6 ms·

Longevity Is Now a Factor When Picking an Embryo for IVF

35 points by Bluestein 1y ago

CommanderData 1y ago
Khan Noonien Singh: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Khan_Noonien_Singh https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Khan_Noonien_Singh
paxcoder 1y ago
[flagged]
- brunoTbear 1y ago
  [flagged]
- tuckerman 1y ago
  Attempting to procreate the normal way "kills" embryos all the time too, often without anyone even being aware, through miscarriages. It seems disingenuous to attribute all these negative externalities to IVF and not to making children "the old fashioned way".
  - AlgorithmicTime 1y ago
    [dead]
  - smeej 1y ago
    There's a big difference between "killing" and "allowing to die." I don't think we should ever be proud of our ability to kill humans even more efficiently than nature does, at any stage of development.
    - tuckerman 1y ago
      I'm quite proud of humanity's ability to help build families where "nature" wasn't able to, I think it's quite beautiful and owe my son to IVF. > There's a big difference between "killing" and "allowing to die." I think this is subject to debate for a lot of people. For full persons (for whatever my definition of that is), I personally agree with you there is a (big) difference. For embryos, I don't really distinguish them because I see them both neutral morally. I do somewhat worry about the long term effects of the sorts of embryo selection discussed in TFA though (not from a moral position but from a "do we _really_ know what this is going to do to the gene pool long term?" position)
      - smeej 1y ago
        In general, I see a significant difference between "this happens because of me" and "this happens regardless of me," even when whatever happens isn't that big of a deal. The difference between 0 and 1 is significant, even on a scale from 0-1000, because one of the options is zero, not because the difference between the options is only 1.
  - paxcoder 1y ago
    [dead]
BJones12 1y ago
https://archive.is/qSrH1 https://archive.is/qSrH1
guywithahat 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
    We'll just switch to the Cavendish human.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- EA-3167 1y 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 1y 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?
donsupreme 1y 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.
- sokoloff 1y ago
  Tell me the parents’ IQs and heights and I can give you a prediction of the embryo’s measures for $59.99.
  - mschuster91 1y 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.
    - sorcerer-mar 1y ago
      Yet despite variation in what people eat and what drugs they take, high-IQ people tend to be born to high-IQ people and same for low-IQ. Even twins raised in totally separate households will have very similar IQs later in life. This epigenetic stuff is invariably copium from people who don’t want to admit their intellectual gifts are in fact gifts and as a corollary, all the downstream economic rewards of intelligence are also mere gifts from the lottery of being born to high-IQ parents.
      - cjbgkagh 1y ago
        It can be both genetic and epigenetic, but concur I was one of those people who believed I was smarter simply because I wanted it more and worked harder. I found out later in life that my outcomes were largely genetic and this has increased my acceptance of others as they are.
cannonpr 1y 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 1y 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.
- cjbgkagh 1y 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.
  - cannonpr 1y 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 1y ago
One more way to scam desperate parents doing IVF out of their money.
smeej 1y 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.
- BugsJustFindMe 1y 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.
  - ImJamal 1y ago
    Embryos are alive. Can you find an embroyotologist who would deny that?
    - Elle_Benjamin 1y ago
      Alive and conscious/sentient are not the same. Something must be sentient to be harmed. Plants are alive. You eat salad, right?
      - BugsJustFindMe 1y ago
        Maybe they're a breatharian. You don't know.
      - cjbgkagh 1y ago
        I think you're defining harm based on sentience where as my definition of harm would include damage to not sentient objects.
cocoto 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
    education, social environment, nutrition, dark and quiet at sleep times, clean air...
  - Bluestein 1y 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 1y 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.
- cjbgkagh 1y 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.
  - Bluestein 1y ago
AStonesThrow 1y ago
Another factor to consider is your clinic's proximity to car bombs and efilists from Reddit Okay, two factors.

35 points by Bluestein 1y ago

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

paxcoder 1y ago

[flagged]

brunoTbear 1y ago
[flagged]
tuckerman 1y ago
Attempting to procreate the normal way "kills" embryos all the time too, often without anyone even being aware, through miscarriages. It seems disingenuous to attribute all these negative externalities to IVF and not to making children "the old fashioned way".
- AlgorithmicTime 1y ago
  [dead]
- smeej 1y ago
  There's a big difference between "killing" and "allowing to die." I don't think we should ever be proud of our ability to kill humans even more efficiently than nature does, at any stage of development.
  - tuckerman 1y ago
    I'm quite proud of humanity's ability to help build families where "nature" wasn't able to, I think it's quite beautiful and owe my son to IVF. > There's a big difference between "killing" and "allowing to die." I think this is subject to debate for a lot of people. For full persons (for whatever my definition of that is), I personally agree with you there is a (big) difference. For embryos, I don't really distinguish them because I see them both neutral morally. I do somewhat worry about the long term effects of the sorts of embryo selection discussed in TFA though (not from a moral position but from a "do we _really_ know what this is going to do to the gene pool long term?" position)
    - smeej 1y ago
      In general, I see a significant difference between "this happens because of me" and "this happens regardless of me," even when whatever happens isn't that big of a deal. The difference between 0 and 1 is significant, even on a scale from 0-1000, because one of the options is zero, not because the difference between the options is only 1.
- paxcoder 1y ago
  [dead]

BJones12 1y ago

https://archive.is/qSrH1 https://archive.is/qSrH1

guywithahat 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
  We'll just switch to the Cavendish human.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
EA-3167 1y 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 1y 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?

donsupreme 1y 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.

sokoloff 1y ago
Tell me the parents’ IQs and heights and I can give you a prediction of the embryo’s measures for $59.99.
- mschuster91 1y 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.
  - sorcerer-mar 1y ago
    Yet despite variation in what people eat and what drugs they take, high-IQ people tend to be born to high-IQ people and same for low-IQ. Even twins raised in totally separate households will have very similar IQs later in life. This epigenetic stuff is invariably copium from people who don’t want to admit their intellectual gifts are in fact gifts and as a corollary, all the downstream economic rewards of intelligence are also mere gifts from the lottery of being born to high-IQ parents.
    - cjbgkagh 1y ago
      It can be both genetic and epigenetic, but concur I was one of those people who believed I was smarter simply because I wanted it more and worked harder. I found out later in life that my outcomes were largely genetic and this has increased my acceptance of others as they are.

cannonpr 1y 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 1y 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.
cjbgkagh 1y 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.
- cannonpr 1y 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 1y ago

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

smeej 1y 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.

BugsJustFindMe 1y 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.
- ImJamal 1y ago
  Embryos are alive. Can you find an embroyotologist who would deny that?
  - Elle_Benjamin 1y ago
    Alive and conscious/sentient are not the same. Something must be sentient to be harmed. Plants are alive. You eat salad, right?
    - BugsJustFindMe 1y ago
      Maybe they're a breatharian. You don't know.
    - cjbgkagh 1y ago
      I think you're defining harm based on sentience where as my definition of harm would include damage to not sentient objects.

cocoto 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
  education, social environment, nutrition, dark and quiet at sleep times, clean air...
- Bluestein 1y 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 1y 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.
cjbgkagh 1y 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.
- Bluestein 1y ago

AStonesThrow 1y ago

Another factor to consider is your clinic's proximity to car bombs and efilists from Reddit Okay, two factors.