What Embryo Selection Means for Humanity - Dr Jonathan Anomaly

I've been advising you guys now for ages, and I think I became convinced that this could be a technology for good probably ever since our first conversation, which was a few years ago now.

A few years ago, yeah.

Why do a lot of people still have such an issue with embryo selection, do you think?

Um, let's see. There's probably a few issues. One is it's still a new technology. Any new technology that hasn't been fully explained to the public, even to doctors, is gonna have some, I think, justifiable skepticism. Um, another reason is people worry about tinkering with the human genome, which we're not doing, but people, um, often, I suppose, confuse embryo selection with gene editing, right? So what we're doing, um, the company Herecyte, is when women do IVF, they, they can already get a bunch of different genetic tests. They could test for, uh, Down syndrome, that's called aneuploidy. They can test for single gene disorders, that's PGT-M, pre-implantation genetic testing for monogenic conditions. We're just doing polygenic conditions. All we're doing is revealing more information about the, the natural genetic variation that exists in your embryos and letting you choose which one to implant. But when we explain that to people, sometimes they think that what you're doing is you're adding new genes or editing the existing genes, and so I think they worry about that. So what's going on? How much do we know about the genome? Um, what are you doing to tinker with it? But in fact, we're not tinkering with anything, so that's probably the main reason people worry about it.

Scott Alexander did a great blog post on this. He had this wonderful example. He says, "A woman goes in for IVF. She produces 10 embryos. The usual technique for deciding which of these 10 embryos to implant is for a doctor to look them over and see which one looks generally the most normally shaped and healthiest." Is this right?

It is, and, uh, i- it's not that there's no correlation whatsoever between, let's say, the morphology or the shape of the embryo and its viability, but there's probably not a huge correlation. (laughs)

Right.

Yeah.

But my, my point here is that there is alread- if you're doing IVF, and I think between sort of 1 and 3% of babies in the US are born through IVF at the moment? Is that right?

Yeah, I think it's at least a few percent.

Okay.

In Denmark, it's 10%, so.

Right. So, you're going through IVF, and currently, if you do IVF, you have this batch of, let's say, maybe 10 fertilized embryos. Somebody's already eyeballing them using some kind of scrutinous ... Like, is, is it eugenics to look at the one that looks the roundest or has the-

The healthiest, the ... Yeah.

Yeah, that has the fewest, and, uh, he sort of finishes the example off, and he says, "This time, the doctor tells the intern to make a decision. The intern chooses embryo number five, but a few hours later, the doctor gets nervous, decides to double-check, disagrees with the intern's assessment, and picks embryo number seven. Embryo seven gets implanted, and the woman gives birth to a healthy baby child." Like, that is what we're talking about here, but just with way less information.