A polymath discusses professorship, parenthood, polygenic scores, and public discourse | Dr. Steve Hsu

Our guest today is Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation. Steve is an entrepreneur and has started successful ventures in embryo selection, forensic genetics and artificial intelligence. Steve Hsu- Steve is a polymath- you can see just how wide his interests are on his blog infoproc. Despite his mathematical chops Steve is great at having conversations- I recommend Aporia listeners check out his podcast Manifold.

During the 2020 racial reckoning, after some controversy, Steve stepped down as Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at Michigan State University. You can see his response to the allegations against him here and his resignation here.

Steve published the first paper showing that polygenic scores can predict phenotype with accuracy- see his paper on height here. Steve and his team also have shown that Genomic Prediction's aneuploidy testing improves pregnancy outcomes. We also talked about my article for Aporia on ethical objections to polygenic screening.

In China, Yousheng, loosely translated as "eugenics" doesn't have a bad connotation- as Steve points out here.

Steve is skeptical about the deleterious effects of polygenic screening or gene editing due to pleiotropy.

Simone Collins, former Aporia guest, was also interviewed on Manifold. She used Genomic Prediction's health index.

We talked about Bryan Caplan's books, The Case Against Education and "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids"