“Importantly, there is limited evidence supporting almost all the claims, however well intentioned. That PGT-P improves real-world child health outcomes in a way that justifies its routine use is unproven”
I hear this claim repeated often by people in the field, most of whom seem unaware that there are multiple papers validating polygenic scores in a within-family context. Just to list a few:
Maybe you’re still thinking “that doesn’t prove these actually work in a clinical context”. But we already have polygenic predictors deployed in clinical practice, such as Myriad’s breast cancer predictor.
But maybe you’re still not convinced. Maybe you think “we need to wait for a bunch of selected embryos to grow up, then observe whether or not selection worked.” In that case, I’d just point out that this dataset already exists: it’s called “siblings”, and it can show you exactly how well predictors perform on selecting an embryo with a lower risk of breast cancer or a higher predicted IQ.
“where is the reliable measure of creativity, practical judgment, personality, motivation and all the other social skills?”
The biobanks from which these predictors are trained have not yet deemed it worthwhile to examine the genetics of these other traits. So for the time being, we’re limited to diseases, IQ, height, and (maybe soon) personality and possibly facial appearance (the latter is still speculative at this point).
The other things you pointed out are of course important too. Motivation is, I think, particularly important. We’ll likely be able to test for this weakly soon via conscienciousness. But there are just obviously many other important human traits that we don’t have good predictors for at all. I think it’s a shame.
But the only way to solve this is with more data, which is too expensive to collect for the moment.
And super babies? Ranking embryos? It feels like market-driven eugenic thinking. I thought we’d moved on from that early to mid-20th century aberration.
Was anyone signing up to be part of 20th century eugenics? Of course not. It wasn’t a voluntary process at all. It was state sponsored sterilization and murder.
If you don’t see the difference between that and embryo selection, you either haven’t thought deeply about it or you’re catholic.
If it’s the latter, I understand. One day we’ll have a way to do this without any excess embryos. But not yet.
Regarding the last section, I think you’re being quite dismissive, i.e. not addressing their concerns and acting as though they don’t have legitimate concerns (while I think probably not in fact understanding their concerns). For example,
If you don’t see the difference between that and embryo selection
I mean, did they say “there is no difference between embryo selection and state-enforced murder”? I think you’re strawmanning them.
If you don’t want to deal with these sorts of comments, fine, that’s understandable, and there’s a lot of other valuable things that you do such that you don’t need to work on addressing these sorts of comments with more attention. As I’ve said repeatedly, I AM VOLUNTEERING TO GIVE THOUGHTFUL RESPECTFUL REAL ANSWERS TO MORAL/ETHICAL CONCERNS ABOUT REPROGENETICS. Please just tag me instead! I imagine (not confidently, but this is my top guess when I quickly try to empathize with you) that you’re doing a social motion that’s something like demonstrating+performing confidence / power, like “yeah actually I’m right, I know I’m right, I know lots of other people agree with me, and I’m expecting lots of people to back me up on this, now and then even more in the future”. I think that’s fine and in some cases good to do, as a general category. But I think that doing it by strawmanning and dismissing is bad. I think that you think that (or act as though) if someone can’t express their concern very clearly, and so you can give a shallow counterargument that they can’t quickly give a compelling response to, then that’s a win. I think that it’s sometimes a win and sometimes a loss, because if the version you’re doing is strawmanning them, then they have a concern which you haven’t addressed but you’ve put them in a position where their (fumbling) attempts to get their concern (however coherent or not it may be) addressed are met with dismissal or even derision, and no easy recourse for more helpful engagement.
This is a fair critique. I think I’ve partially ended up training myself to respond too dismissively by spending a lot of time engaging with the attention dynamics of Twitter.
“Importantly, there is limited evidence supporting almost all the claims, however well intentioned. That PGT-P improves real-world child health outcomes in a way that justifies its routine use is unproven”
I hear this claim repeated often by people in the field, most of whom seem unaware that there are multiple papers validating polygenic scores in a within-family context. Just to list a few:
Lello et al Wolfram et al Moore et al Plomin et al Selzam et al
Maybe you’re still thinking “that doesn’t prove these actually work in a clinical context”. But we already have polygenic predictors deployed in clinical practice, such as Myriad’s breast cancer predictor.
But maybe you’re still not convinced. Maybe you think “we need to wait for a bunch of selected embryos to grow up, then observe whether or not selection worked.” In that case, I’d just point out that this dataset already exists: it’s called “siblings”, and it can show you exactly how well predictors perform on selecting an embryo with a lower risk of breast cancer or a higher predicted IQ.
“where is the reliable measure of creativity, practical judgment, personality, motivation and all the other social skills?”
The biobanks from which these predictors are trained have not yet deemed it worthwhile to examine the genetics of these other traits. So for the time being, we’re limited to diseases, IQ, height, and (maybe soon) personality and possibly facial appearance (the latter is still speculative at this point).
The other things you pointed out are of course important too. Motivation is, I think, particularly important. We’ll likely be able to test for this weakly soon via conscienciousness. But there are just obviously many other important human traits that we don’t have good predictors for at all. I think it’s a shame.
But the only way to solve this is with more data, which is too expensive to collect for the moment.
Was anyone signing up to be part of 20th century eugenics? Of course not. It wasn’t a voluntary process at all. It was state sponsored sterilization and murder.
If you don’t see the difference between that and embryo selection, you either haven’t thought deeply about it or you’re catholic.
If it’s the latter, I understand. One day we’ll have a way to do this without any excess embryos. But not yet.
Regarding the last section, I think you’re being quite dismissive, i.e. not addressing their concerns and acting as though they don’t have legitimate concerns (while I think probably not in fact understanding their concerns). For example,
I mean, did they say “there is no difference between embryo selection and state-enforced murder”? I think you’re strawmanning them.
If you don’t want to deal with these sorts of comments, fine, that’s understandable, and there’s a lot of other valuable things that you do such that you don’t need to work on addressing these sorts of comments with more attention. As I’ve said repeatedly, I AM VOLUNTEERING TO GIVE THOUGHTFUL RESPECTFUL REAL ANSWERS TO MORAL/ETHICAL CONCERNS ABOUT REPROGENETICS. Please just tag me instead! I imagine (not confidently, but this is my top guess when I quickly try to empathize with you) that you’re doing a social motion that’s something like demonstrating+performing confidence / power, like “yeah actually I’m right, I know I’m right, I know lots of other people agree with me, and I’m expecting lots of people to back me up on this, now and then even more in the future”. I think that’s fine and in some cases good to do, as a general category. But I think that doing it by strawmanning and dismissing is bad. I think that you think that (or act as though) if someone can’t express their concern very clearly, and so you can give a shallow counterargument that they can’t quickly give a compelling response to, then that’s a win. I think that it’s sometimes a win and sometimes a loss, because if the version you’re doing is strawmanning them, then they have a concern which you haven’t addressed but you’ve put them in a position where their (fumbling) attempts to get their concern (however coherent or not it may be) addressed are met with dismissal or even derision, and no easy recourse for more helpful engagement.
This is a fair critique. I think I’ve partially ended up training myself to respond too dismissively by spending a lot of time engaging with the attention dynamics of Twitter.