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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How to have Polygenically Screened Children, published by GeneSmith on May 7, 2023 on LessWrong.
Polygenic screening is a method for modifying the traits of future children via embryo selection. If that sounds like gobbledygook, then think of it a bit like choosing stats for your baby.
That may sound amazing. It may sound like science fiction. It may even sound horribly dystopian. But whatever your feelings, it is in fact possible. And these benefits are available for a price that, while expensive, is within reach for most middle-class families.
On a more serious note, there is limited selection power available with today's technologies, so you will not be able to have a baby Einstein unless you are already a Nobel laureate. But polygenic screening will allow you to decrease your child's risk of common diseases by 10-60%, reduce their risk of mental disorders, and increase their IQ by somewhere between 3 and 8 points. If you are willing to wait a few years, you may be able to increase IQ by up to 13 points. These benefits are available for between $20k-100k depending on how strong of a benefit you want and what kinds of traits you want to select for.
There has been quite a bit of discussion of this topic on LessWrong and adjacent communities but very little concrete advice for would-be parents who are curious whether the benefits are worth the price, particularly for those who have no other reason to do IVF. The purpose of this post is to fill that gap by addressing costs, potential medical complications, choice of clinic, which labs are best, and how age and infertility diagnosis affect the expected benefits.
This is a long post and I expect most people will not want to read the whole thing. If this is you, please use the section selector in the sidebar to navigate to the section you are most interested in. You may want to simply skip to the section titled "Concrete Advice for Would-Be Parents".
Background on IVF
Wait, what even is polygenic embryo selection?
Embryo selection is all about picking an embryo to (hopefully) turn into a baby. This occurs during the process of In-Vitro Fertilization, or IVF. In the typical IVF cycle, a couple goes into a fertility clinic because they want to have a baby. Usually this is because they’ve been having trouble conceiving naturally, but couples also seek out IVF when they want to do genetic testing, select the sex of their child, or to preserve fertility for later pregnancy.
The doctor conducts a bunch of medical tests, and if they all check out, the woman begins a hormone regimen that will stimulate an abnormally large number of her eggs to mature all at once.
At the end of the regiment, the doctor extracts a bunch of mature eggs from the woman's ovaries, which are then fertilized using the father's sperm and grown in a lab dish for 4-7 days. When the embryo has finished growing, there are often four or more that can be implanted in the mother. Most couples do not want four children, so a choice must be made about which embryo to pick.
In ye olden days, doctors would often just transfer all the embryos at once in the hope that at least one of them would result in a baby. Sometimes this would work well; one of the embryos would happen to stick and the parents would be very happy. Other times it would work a little too well and more than one of the embryos would implant. This is why twin births are so much more common during IVF than during normal pregnancy.
Transferring multiple embryos at a time is less common nowadays because the outcomes for twin births are on average worse than for single pregnancies. Twins are more likely to be born preterm, develop health problems, and put excess stress on the mother's body.
This brings me back to my original point; the doctor or embryologist has to make a choice about which embryo to tr...
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