Challenges and Uncertainties in Creating Designer Babies

This post was inspired by some talks at the recent LessOnline conference including one by LessWrong user “Gene Smith”.

Let's say you want to have a “designer baby”. Genetically extraordinary in some way — super athletic, super beautiful, whatever.

6’5”, blue eyes, with a trust fund.

Ethics aside[1], what would be necessary to actually do this?

Fundamentally, any kind of “superbaby” or “designer baby” project depends on two steps:

1.) figure out what genes you ideally want;

2.) create an embryo with those genes.

It's already standard to do a very simple version of this two-step process. In the typical course of in-vitro fertilization (IVF), embryos are usually screened for chromosomal abnormalities that would cause disabilities like Down Syndrome, and only the “healthy” embryos are implanted.

But most (partially) heritable traits and disease risks are not as easy to predict.

Polygenic Scores

If what you care about is [...]

---

Outline:

(01:16) Polygenic Scores

(03:35) Massively Multiplexed, Body-Wide Gene Editing? Not So Much, Yet.

(06:45) Embryo Selection

(07:52) “Iterated Embryo Selection”?

(09:33) Iterated Meiosis?

(13:29) Generating Naive Pluripotent Cells

(16:50) What's Missing?

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

The original text contained 2 images which were described by AI.

---

First published:
July 11th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2uJsiQqHTjePTRqi4/superbabies-putting-the-pieces-together

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---