Paywalled article, but here’s an older one that covers the same stuff (use private browser if ran out of monthly free articles) : https://www.wired.com/story/this-woman-will-decide-which-babies-are-born-noor-siddiqui-orchid/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/01/opinion/ivf-gene-selection-fertility.html
6 Comments
Isn’t that the premise of Gattaca? That movie is almost 30 years old.
A profile on one of the many new companies which offers genetic screening of embryos and couples to help people predict the risk of disease in their children and possibly select for traits of interest.
Interesting concept but lots of underlying ethical and effectiveness concerns here. For monogenic diseases, they should be able to identify them earlier and screen them out so it’s primarily the ethics issues (e.g. what happens when the company is wrong, or will the children of folks who can’t afford this be at a disadvantage).
For polygenic diseases and traits, I’m very skeptical that there’s a similar risk benefit profile. As a clinical genetics researcher, I work with these polygenic risk scores everyday and they often haven’t been externally validated in broad populations, are designed to risk stratify the population rather than predict individual risk, and are generally very low predictive value for most diseases/traits. Pretty worried about a future where people overly rely on these for making big decisions like selecting an embryo or a life partner.
This planet is a flaming shitheap, maybe designer babies could save us, and anyways if we want humans that can actually contribute to science and compete with AI we’ll need a buff, unless we just want to become dumb worker drones doing construction for our AI God.
So eugenics… But its different this time, swear… This time its ethical… 😑
Ask Vivian (Musk’s ‘dead son’) how well this works out for the child…
Also, wasn’t flaws in this idea a big part of Bashir’s character in Star Trek: DS9?
Screening for genetic diseases is all well and good but gender is going too far. Even if you have the ability to do some things, you still should not do it. Undercut that we still lack full understanding of how genes work with the added complexity of epigenetics and micro bioms, at this point even screening for genetic disorders is borderline not science but speculation.