<story><title>China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5gw8vn/chinas-taking-over-the-world-with-a-massive-genetic-engineering-program</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sillysaurus3</author><text>Me. In general, the less intelligent people are, the less they contribute to society. I&amp;#x27;d rather live in an engineered society with engineered people.&lt;p&gt;The primary problem to solve is discrimination against non-engineered people. That problem was the only reason Gattaca was so dystopian. As long as there are controls in place that make it difficult, it should be possible to move forward with engineering humans in a productive way.</text></item><item><author>le-mark</author><text>Sounds like you&amp;#x27;re really plugged into this. Is there really a contingent out there that thinks Gattaca[1] is a desirable outcome?&lt;p&gt;Edit; citing the movie as a widely known example of a stratified society with both engineered and non engineered humans.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Gattaca&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Gattaca&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>gwern</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s a little difficult to summarize what has happened since, since &lt;i&gt;so&lt;/i&gt; much has happened. This is a golden age of human genetics which has no precedent, and major new findings are being uploaded to Biorxiv at an almost daily rate.&lt;p&gt;I think the short version would be that the BGI project made a bad bet on a particular genetic architecture of intelligence (rare variants with large boosting effects) which would have implied that a tiny sample of whole genomes from very smart people would yield a lot of genetic variants; this was wrong and they turned up little, and then the project was further damaged by BGI&amp;#x27;s disastrous strategic choice to try to develop its own genome sequencer tech rather than using Illumina&amp;#x27;s, which set it back by years. What actually wound up happening in 2013 was that a big consortium of American &amp;amp; European research groups, the SSGAC, pooled simple SNP data (ie the sort of thing you get from 23andMe) rather than whole genomes, for 100k people, and got the first genetic variants for intelligence (rendering the BGI project largely moot). SSGAC has kept expanding its sample size, and the massive UK Biobank dataset started coming online (just completed their full n=500k release!), and the combination has yielded hit after hit. The last paper from last year turned up 172 SNP hits, and there will be another paper this year which will expand that even more.&lt;p&gt;In conjunction with this, the IQ polygenic scores have been used for all sorts of exciting things: people have been computing genetic correlations with health and psychiatric traits, been looking at cross-national differences, examined changes over thousands of years using ancient DNA, decreases over the past century confirming dysgenics, been deploying methods for detecting selection in different populations, and nailing down the architecture as having the same heritability in normal people as in very intelligent people with no special rare variants detected, and being mostly additive with most of that coming from common SNPs but the rest from relatively rare harmful variants suggesting a mutation load explanation of why there is any genetic contribution.&lt;p&gt;As far as embryo selection goes, &amp;#x27;5-15 points&amp;#x27; is very much an upper bound assuming the entire population, great polygenic scores (better than the ones in 2017, perhaps more like 2020-level), and ignoring the practicalities like loss of embryos in the IVF process. I&amp;#x27;ve tried to work through a full analysis of what embryo selection could do, and it&amp;#x27;s not earth-shaking unless there are huge improvements: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gwern.net&amp;#x2F;Embryo%20selection&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gwern.net&amp;#x2F;Embryo%20selection&lt;/a&gt; (Which is why I&amp;#x27;m more interested in iterated embryo selection and genome synthesis now.)</text></item><item><author>smaili</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s the primary piece:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation&amp;#x27;s intelligence by five to 15 IQ points.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s also interesting to note this was authored in 2013. I would be curious to know the kinds of things discovered in the ~4 year span.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SideburnsOfDoom</author><text>&amp;gt; Me. In general, the less intelligent people are, the less they contribute to society. I&amp;#x27;d rather live in an engineered society with engineered people.&lt;p&gt;If you are looking for bang for the buck in raising the average IQ across the whole population, then there are serious quick wins in eliminating things that drag it down. For instance, exposure to lead. And it&amp;#x27;s doable, hardly rocket science or genetic engineering.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re looking for a few very rich people to give their offspring another advantage over the rest, then genetic engineering becomes more pertinent.</text></comment>
<story><title>China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5gw8vn/chinas-taking-over-the-world-with-a-massive-genetic-engineering-program</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sillysaurus3</author><text>Me. In general, the less intelligent people are, the less they contribute to society. I&amp;#x27;d rather live in an engineered society with engineered people.&lt;p&gt;The primary problem to solve is discrimination against non-engineered people. That problem was the only reason Gattaca was so dystopian. As long as there are controls in place that make it difficult, it should be possible to move forward with engineering humans in a productive way.</text></item><item><author>le-mark</author><text>Sounds like you&amp;#x27;re really plugged into this. Is there really a contingent out there that thinks Gattaca[1] is a desirable outcome?&lt;p&gt;Edit; citing the movie as a widely known example of a stratified society with both engineered and non engineered humans.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Gattaca&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Gattaca&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>gwern</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s a little difficult to summarize what has happened since, since &lt;i&gt;so&lt;/i&gt; much has happened. This is a golden age of human genetics which has no precedent, and major new findings are being uploaded to Biorxiv at an almost daily rate.&lt;p&gt;I think the short version would be that the BGI project made a bad bet on a particular genetic architecture of intelligence (rare variants with large boosting effects) which would have implied that a tiny sample of whole genomes from very smart people would yield a lot of genetic variants; this was wrong and they turned up little, and then the project was further damaged by BGI&amp;#x27;s disastrous strategic choice to try to develop its own genome sequencer tech rather than using Illumina&amp;#x27;s, which set it back by years. What actually wound up happening in 2013 was that a big consortium of American &amp;amp; European research groups, the SSGAC, pooled simple SNP data (ie the sort of thing you get from 23andMe) rather than whole genomes, for 100k people, and got the first genetic variants for intelligence (rendering the BGI project largely moot). SSGAC has kept expanding its sample size, and the massive UK Biobank dataset started coming online (just completed their full n=500k release!), and the combination has yielded hit after hit. The last paper from last year turned up 172 SNP hits, and there will be another paper this year which will expand that even more.&lt;p&gt;In conjunction with this, the IQ polygenic scores have been used for all sorts of exciting things: people have been computing genetic correlations with health and psychiatric traits, been looking at cross-national differences, examined changes over thousands of years using ancient DNA, decreases over the past century confirming dysgenics, been deploying methods for detecting selection in different populations, and nailing down the architecture as having the same heritability in normal people as in very intelligent people with no special rare variants detected, and being mostly additive with most of that coming from common SNPs but the rest from relatively rare harmful variants suggesting a mutation load explanation of why there is any genetic contribution.&lt;p&gt;As far as embryo selection goes, &amp;#x27;5-15 points&amp;#x27; is very much an upper bound assuming the entire population, great polygenic scores (better than the ones in 2017, perhaps more like 2020-level), and ignoring the practicalities like loss of embryos in the IVF process. I&amp;#x27;ve tried to work through a full analysis of what embryo selection could do, and it&amp;#x27;s not earth-shaking unless there are huge improvements: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gwern.net&amp;#x2F;Embryo%20selection&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gwern.net&amp;#x2F;Embryo%20selection&lt;/a&gt; (Which is why I&amp;#x27;m more interested in iterated embryo selection and genome synthesis now.)</text></item><item><author>smaili</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s the primary piece:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation&amp;#x27;s intelligence by five to 15 IQ points.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s also interesting to note this was authored in 2013. I would be curious to know the kinds of things discovered in the ~4 year span.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>le-mark</author><text>The ladies who empty the trash here contribute more to society than I do. I just write throwaway apps for throwaway companies, they actually DO something.</text></comment>