What is the tradeoff between having a baby now and waiting a few years? Like if I have a baby now with the current technology, how many IQ points, risk of Alzheimer or depression etc. will the baby miss out on if it was instead born in five years?
Also, how is similar technology but for adults coming along? Do you think it the case that it doesn’t really matter when you have kids because you can do gene therapy (or something like that) to adults that will give the same benefits?
What is the tradeoff between having a baby now and waiting a few years? Like if I have a baby know with the current technology, how many IQ points, risk of Alzheimer or depression etc. will the baby miss out on if it was instead born in five years?
Right now you can get about +8 points of IQ from 10 embryos. A theoretically perfect predictor could get you about +13.
For Alzheimer’s it’s probably a similar gap between current and theoretically optimal.
However I don’t think we’re going to hit the ceiling of max gains in the next few years. We need way more data for that and no one is on track to gather that much.
My guess is IQ gain might get up to 9 or 10 in the next couple of years, and we’ll continue to see marginal improvements in other stuff like diseases.
The tech for adults is much harder. We continue to see improvements in therapeutics for a lot of things like high cholesterol, cancers, etc. So I’m hopeful those will actually make many of the diseases we can currently screen for much more treatable in a few decades.
As for doing genetic modification in adults, we’ve got the most rudimentary possible stuff right now. Probably the most interesting one from a layperson point of view is Verve-102, which knocks out PCSK9 in the liver, permanently lowering cholesterol. I think this would likely have positive impacts for almost anyone who got it, though the largest benefits will accrue to people with a family history of high cholesterol.
For more systemic, polygenic stuff, the best bet is probably something like what R3 Bio is doing growing “organ sacks”. If you can grow new organs (or potentially even a new body without a brain), you could genetically engineer it to be resistant to almost any disease you can think of.
What is the tradeoff between having a baby now and waiting a few years? Like if I have a baby now with the current technology, how many IQ points, risk of Alzheimer or depression etc. will the baby miss out on if it was instead born in five years?
Also, how is similar technology but for adults coming along? Do you think it the case that it doesn’t really matter when you have kids because you can do gene therapy (or something like that) to adults that will give the same benefits?
Right now you can get about +8 points of IQ from 10 embryos. A theoretically perfect predictor could get you about +13.
For Alzheimer’s it’s probably a similar gap between current and theoretically optimal.
However I don’t think we’re going to hit the ceiling of max gains in the next few years. We need way more data for that and no one is on track to gather that much.
My guess is IQ gain might get up to 9 or 10 in the next couple of years, and we’ll continue to see marginal improvements in other stuff like diseases.
The tech for adults is much harder. We continue to see improvements in therapeutics for a lot of things like high cholesterol, cancers, etc. So I’m hopeful those will actually make many of the diseases we can currently screen for much more treatable in a few decades.
As for doing genetic modification in adults, we’ve got the most rudimentary possible stuff right now. Probably the most interesting one from a layperson point of view is Verve-102, which knocks out PCSK9 in the liver, permanently lowering cholesterol. I think this would likely have positive impacts for almost anyone who got it, though the largest benefits will accrue to people with a family history of high cholesterol.
For more systemic, polygenic stuff, the best bet is probably something like what R3 Bio is doing growing “organ sacks”. If you can grow new organs (or potentially even a new body without a brain), you could genetically engineer it to be resistant to almost any disease you can think of.
I want to write more about this before too long.