I’m a software developer by training with an interest in genetics. I currently run a startup working on multiplex gene editing technology.
GeneSmith
Karma: 5,835
We do not know and can not know what the long term effects “polygenic embryo selection”—or “unnatural selection” will be.
I think you could make the same argument about almost any technology. Was it foreseeable that the transistor would lead to the rise of cell phones and social media? Maybe to a small number of highly prescient people, but it certainly wasn’t obvious to most people.
However in the case of embryo selection I think the near term effects at least are pretty foreseeable because we can look at real siblings, see which ones have better polygenic scores for various things, and then check whether those people experience other serious downsides.
The answer is mostly “no”. Siblings with higher polygenic scores for IQ, for example, tend to have lower rates of mental illness, longer life expectancy, lower divorce rates, higher incomes, and lower rates of cardiovascular disease.
There are SOME exceptions to this; higher IQ correlates at about 0.15 with aspergers, and at about 0.06 with anorexia. But these exceptions are… exceptions. Most “good things” seem to run together at a genetic level.
None of these correlations are that strong, by the way. IQ only correlates with hypertension at about −0.07 or so.
And for diseases in general, you can see they overwhelmingly have positive correlations, meaning if you selected against one disease, chances are good that it will slightly decrease others.
A “better” approach: Accept that “Idiocracy” is a documentary film, ban IVF and let history take its course :-)
This seems like a bad approach to me.
Or if we want to fight “Idiocracy” naturally—make it a degree requirement, for PhD students, to have at least one child :-D
I’m guessing you’re just kind of trolling here, but i’ll answer like a true autist by taking this proposal seriously.
This is the bad kind of eugenics. We tried stuff like this in the 20th century and it overwhelmingly did not go well.
I worry about this too. One of my biggest concerns with embryo selection is that people in certain social circles will come to believe that you’re only a responsible parent if you have children via embryo selection, and that if they can’t they just won’t have them.
I think the best solution to this long term is to just make the tech really cheap and broadly available. But I also think we should try to encourage people to have more kids. Babies are great!
I’m glad it was helpful! Do you have a clinic in mind?
Very happy to hear it! When you get around to it feel free to send me an email or a DM. I help people with this sort of stuff all the time.
So you’re saying that freezing your eggs much younger is better because you can use more eggs for embryo selection.
This is not the only claim I am making, but yes, it is one of them. The number of retrievals you have to do to have as many children as you want also decreases if you freeze eggs younger.
It’s interesting how we did not need this technology for thousands of years of very intelligent human beings being born and changing the course of society through scientific breakthroughs.
We didn’t need vaccines to get Isaac Newton. Yet vaccines have in fact helped scientific progress significantly by keeping the population healthier and less vulnerable to plagues. There have probably been many people of Newton’s caliber who died before they had a chance to contribute meaningfully to scientific progress.
Now smart people who are rich enough can ensure they have smart kids with higher IQs, but I’m not really sure that higher IQ points would translate to better life outcomes for the child or for society. I really wonder if there’s much correlation between someone’s IQ and how much positive societal impact they have been responsible for.
So the research on this is actually fairly clear; higher IQ translates well into better outcomes both for the individual and for society. IQ correlates with higher incomes, better education, lower divorce rates, more occupational prestige, and more choices about what kind of life/career path to take.
There’s also fairly clear sign that higher IQ translates to better societal outcomes as well. There’s an exponential relationship between IQ and innovation, as measured by number of patents granted. Garrett Jones also has some really interesting data in his book “Hive Mind” showing that smarter individuals tend to cooperate more in iterated prisoner’s dilemma and public goods games. Not really because they’re more moral, but because they’re more able to recognize situations in which cooperation is mutually beneficial.
There aren’t many good things IQ correlates negatively with, though one notable exception is fertility, which (at least in past data) correlated negatively with number of children.
What is the point of having a neurotic super high IQ child that shoots up a school or sends bombs in the mail because they have emotional issues.
I mean… there is no point in that, so I think you’ve answered your own question. But you also seem to be implying that making someone smarter would make them more neurotic or more violent, which doesn’t hold up to any amount of scrutiny.
If you look at Stanek & Ones (2023), you can see there’s actually a NEGATIVE association between IQ and neuroticism. Even the 2025 correction to that meta-analysis shows a negative correlation (though I think for the better designed meta-analysis the effect size was closer to like −0.08)
So I don’t really understand why you think making people smarter is going to turn everyone into a violent psychopath. If anything we’d expect it to slightly decrease the odds of those sorts of outcomes.
GPT 5.2 is misunderstanding the claim. If the first embryo results in a failed transfer, then yes, subsequent transfers from the same cycle can “count” in the sense that live births from second or later transfers can change the outcome for the cycle from “no birth” to “birth”.
What they DON’T change is the outcome when the patient has already had a child from an earlier embryo. In that case, subsequent births really are ignored.
I mentioned the annual storage cost for CNY Fertility, but you’re right, I should include it for the other options as well.
If you did you would be only the second woman I’ve ever met to do so at approximately the biologically optimal age!
Oh wow. I’m so sorry. That’s very hard.
Ahh I see. Yes, that does pose some challenges. Well best of luck to you.
Oh, well if you want a family, why not start working again?
I’m sorry to hear it man. The good news is you actually still have a chance for a child even if you wait another decade. It will become harder (for multiple reasons, not just sperm quality), but you still have a chance.
I wish you the best of luck in finding a job. That will probably help you have kids much more than sperm freezing.
Yes, you definitely should! Storing sperm is cheap. The procedure to freeze it is usually around $1000 and it’s typically $100-$200/year to store. I still haven’t picked a company to do it myself, but I think they’re all generally pretty good. Vitrification seems to work a bit better than conventional storage.
Yeah, this is fair. My personal take is that polygenic embryo selection changes the calculus a fair bit. A good third of my friends are now having children via IVF just to get access to embryo selection. If you’re going to do that anyways, then freezing eggs at a younger age starts to become a bit of a no-brainer.
The language on Joh Hopkins website is being deliberately conservative. The reality is we have almost no data on eggs that have been frozen longer than 10 years, so they say 10 years becuase we don’t have direct evidence for them being viable longer. What data we do have on eggs that have been frozen and then used after 4-8 years indicates time frozen has no effect on survival rates or fertilization rates. It would be very surprising to me if there’s no impact on survival after 8 years, but at 10 years they suddenly start to degrade.
You can look a little further afield for more direct evidence of the long-term efficacy of freezing for fertility preservation. There are some neat animal studies in which sperm frozen for 50 years was used to create sheep, with the authors noting that the pregnancy rate of the frozen semen was identical to the pregnancy rate for the fresh semen.
My best guess is you’d see essentially zero degradation from longer freezing periods.
The optimal age to freeze eggs is 19
Flag proposal:
Reasons why I think this is a good flag:
It’s simple
It communicates the message
People will be reminded of it every time they see a stop sign, which is a lot
I think perhaps part of the reason this post didn’t get reviewed is because it’s kind of a compressed version of a post I wrote later which can be seen here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DfrSZaf3JC8vJdbZL/how-to-make-superbabies
Maybe worth reviewing this one independently. But both posts more or less came from the same talk at LessOnline 2024.
This was perhaps an understandable viewpoint to hold in June when the best publicly available IQ predictor from the EA4 study only correlated with actual IQ at .3 in the general population (and less within family, which is what matters for embryo selection).
I happened to have spoken with some of the people from Herasight at the time and knew they had a predictor that performed quite a bit better than what was publicly available, which is where my optimism was coming from.
In October they finally published their validation white paper so now I can point to something other than private conversations to show you really can get as big of a boost as claimed.
Some people are still skeptical. Sasha Gusev for example has claimed that Herasight applied a “fudge factor” to get to 20% of variance explained by adjusting adjusting for the noisiness of the UKBB and ABCD cohorts. This is based on the fact that their raw predictor explained 13.7% of the within-family variance, and they applied an “adjustment factor” to that based on the fact that the test they validated on only has a test-retest correlation of .61.
I don’t find the critique all that convincing, though my knowledge in the reliability of different psychometric methods is still pretty limited so take my opinion with a grain of salt. It’s well known that UKBB’s fluid intelligence test is pretty noisy, and the method they used to correct for that (disattenuation) seems pretty bog-standard.
They also published a follow-up in which they used another method, latent variable modeling, which produced similar results.All that being said, it would be better if there were third-party benchmarks like we have in the AI field to evaluate the relative strength of all these different predictors.
I think it’s probably about time to create or fund an org to do this kind of thing. We need something like METR or MLPerf for genetic predictors. No such benchmarks exist right now.
This is actually a real problem. No dataset exists right now that we can guarantee hasn’t been used in the training of these models. And while I basically believe that most of these companies have done their evaluations honestly (with the possible exception of Nucleus), relying on companies honestly reporting predictor performance when they have an economic incentive to exaggerate or cheat is not ideal.I think you could actuallly start out with an incredibly small dataset. Even just 100 samples would be enough to make a binary “bullshit” or “plausible” validation set on continuous value predictors like height or IQ.
So far as we know, there are no additional risks. The main risk is you spend a lot of money on keeping them frozen for longer.
Almost certainly yes
If you’re planning to have your final kid within a year, freezing eggs doesn’t really make sense unless you’re older and you need to bank a lot of eggs to have a good shot at having that kid.
For anything over a year, freezing eggs makes sense for fertility preservation.