What Embryo Selection Means for Humanity - Jonathan Anomaly - #1017

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, 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? 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 going to have some, I think, justifiable skepticism. Another reason is people worry about tinkering with the human genome, which we're not doing, but people often, I suppose, confuse embryo selection with gene editing, right? So what we're doing, um, the company Herasite, is when women do IVF, they can already get a bunch of different genetic tests. They could test for Down syndrome, that's called anuploidy.

They can test for single gene disorders, that's PGTM, 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 you're editing the existing genes. And so I think they worry about that.

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