Embryo Selection
When you are in San Francisco, you get to meet a lot of interesting people with interesting ideas. Among all the interesting ideas I’ve heard this year, the wildest one was embryo selection for cosmetic purposes. I cannot give you too many details for their privacy, but they have already raised millions of dollars from investors and have been providing their embryo selection service privately. The team seems legit, with founders from MIT.
Their embryo selection service is built on in vitro fertilization (IVF), which helps fertilize an egg outside a body. IVF is already so common that more than 5 million babies have been born through this technology. The company focuses on the software side of things by analyzing different embryos provided by their customers through IVF.
You may be thinking that their service is nothing noble because it has been common to choose embryos based on gender or for therapeutic reasons. For example, you can deterministically figure out if a baby has genetic diseases like Down syndrome and sickle cell disease, and parents can already choose not to grow these embryos.
Here is their catch. They help you choose the best embryo for cosmetic reasons. They analyze relationships between gene sequences and some traits like intelligence, attractiveness, creativity, and other factors using a genome database from a biobank like The UK Biobank. The founder told me that although these traits can be determined only probabilistically, the best embryo’s standard deviation is +12%, which means it is 12% better than the average. This is significant when you compare the most intelligent embryo with the least intelligent one which you might choose randomly without their analysis.
It sounded like it was not their initial plan to focus on cosmetic selection, but they started gaining traction when they introduced it.
I bet that with the democratization of techniques like In vitro fertilization (IVF) and in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), we will have an abundance of embryos in the future. With that, embryo selection will be much more common. Our normal way of fertilization will be a lot less common and sex will be done only for pleasure.
What was once limited to choosing an embryo free of genetic disorders could evolve into a world where parents can shape the very essence of their child’s future based on genetic data in the not-too-distant future. Perhaps, in our lifetime, we might find ourselves discussing, over ramen in the city, which embryo we should choose with our partner.