Imagine you could select your future child based on likely intelligence. Would you?
By Philip Ball,
Prospect
| 03. 06. 2023
Imagine you’re planning to have a baby and are told there’s a method that can select the embryo to increase, by 2 per cent, the chance of them getting into a top school. Would you use it? A new survey found that more than four in 10 Americans say they would. This study of attitudes towards a technique called preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic risk (PGT-P) shows that there could be a substantial market for it if it is made available for such applications. The technology would not, say bioethicist Michelle N Meyer of Geisinger Health System in Danville, Pennsylvania, and her co-authors, just be adopted by a few “idiosyncratic individuals”, as has sometimes been suggested previously.
Of course, if you’re sensible then you will ask about the small print. How much does the process cost? Is it risky? Since it requires IVF, so that the prospective embryos can be genetically tested before implantation, would you opt for that even if it would not otherwise be necessary to conceive? But the researchers intentionally set a low bar for the 6,823...
Related Articles
By Azeen Ghorayshi and Sarah Kliff, The New York Times | 08.12.2024
An emerging movement against in vitro fertilization is driving some doctors and patients in red states to move or destroy frozen embryos.
The embryo migration is most striking in Alabama, where the State Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos...
By Editorial Staff, The Lancet | 07.20.2024
Image by DrKontogianniIVF from Wikimedia Commons
Despite major advances in securing sexual and reproductive rights globally, one aspect is continually neglected: infertility. Evolving gender norms and financial precariousness have led to delayed childbearing, which increases infertility in both males and...
By Staff, AP-NORC | 07.12.2024
Image by Dr. Jayesh Amin from Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by-SA 3.0
Most adults support protecting access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, a type of fertility treatment where eggs are combined with sperm outside the body in a...
By Julia Black and Margaux MacColl, The Information [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 07.19.2024
When venture capitalist Jack Abraham first began dating his wife, Gabriella Massamillo, he insisted on one condition: that when they were ready to have children, she’d be willing to conceive using in vitro fertilization. Abraham had lost both his mother...