Silicon Valley has lost its mind about genetics. Huge interest in short-sleep etc variants (candidate gene nonsense), embryo selection for cognitive traits (extremely low real-life predictive ability), and Jiankui He (charlatan whose human gene editing totally failed AND made many off-target edits) - ThreadSky

kristjanmoore.bsky.social • 66 days ago

Silicon Valley has lost its mind about genetics.

Huge interest in short-sleep etc variants (candidate gene nonsense), embryo selection for cognitive traits (extremely low real-life predictive ability), and Jiankui He (charlatan whose human gene editing totally failed AND made many off-target edits)

1 / 4

Comments

kristjanmoore.bsky.social•6 days ago

World collide: a Silicon Valley-sphere roadmap for genetically editing high-IQ "superbabies" uses as a supporting citation the same deeply flawed aDNA paper I compained about earlier today.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DfrSZaf3JC8vJdbZL/how-to-make-superbabies#On_autoimmune_risk_variants_and_plagues

shaicarmi.bsky.social•6 days ago

The type of thinking is challenging to debate. The big picture is reasonable and promising. It's clearly well thought out. But it's the fine technical details that they get wrong.

In that article - the fact that causal variants are unknown and not coming anytime soon despite billions in investment.

shaicarmi.bsky.social•6 days ago

I mean, I think it's almost a no-brainer that in 20 years embryos will get their PCSK9 gene edited for reduced LDLC. But it's a long way before editong hundreds of variants for "super babies" with an IQ of 170 and a lifespan of 130 years.

shaicarmi.bsky.social•6 days ago

Another thing I find really weird is years-long enthusiasm regarding "iterated embryo selection". In more standard language, it's repeated selfing, each selecting for the best polygenic scores in each iteration.
Only that you end up with an entirely homozygous genome, which is probably not so great.

kristjanmoore.bsky.social•66 days ago

Seems plausible that this is partly due to the exodus of academic geneticists from Twitter, leaving an echo chamber of SF contrarian uber-reductionists memeing themselves into hype over snake oils.

(Will be another issue entirely if and when these technologies actually begin to work as marketed.)

shaicarmi.bsky.social•66 days ago

These are very funny (or scary) examples, but do you think it's more than just anecdotes and day dreaming? Do people in SV actually try to implement these interventions?

kristjanmoore.bsky.social•66 days ago

Last image above shows that some are doing embryo selection. Heliospect does seem to be specifically offering analysis of cognitive traits. I would guess that some are going for cognitive traits formally or informally. Editing hopefully farther off, but there is clearly enthusiasm for it:

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply