The most important works on embryo selection for IQ (Shulman, Bostrom, Branwen); the utility of polygenic screening from Karavani et al.; genetic architecture of intelligence from Hsu
How far are we from the technology described by Heinlein in _Beyond This Horizon_, an early novel? The idea was to select separately on sperm and ovum. The trick to examining them nondestructively was to take advantage of the fact that the process of creating either throws off additional bodies with the genes not included which can be analyzed destructively to determine the genetic content of the gamete.
Obviously the gametes have to be produced in vitro for this to work. If it could be done it would be a much more powerful technology than selecting on embryos.
This is completely mind-blowing to me. Why are there not more governments funding this? I can't think of many things that would have a better return on investment for a country than increasing the average IQ of its citizens.
I've been familiar with Hsu's work for a while now, but somehow I've never seen the Shulman 2014 paper! I'd always implicitly assumed that embryonic selection would have to be "slow"--you could only select among embryos created from the gametes of the parents. And if you wanted to do another IQ selection event, you would have to wait for the embryo to reach the age of sexual maturity, and then repeat the process.
But if you can use stem cells to create gametes derived from selected embryos...what is even the upper bound there? 30 IQ points? Even more?
How far are we from the technology described by Heinlein in _Beyond This Horizon_, an early novel? The idea was to select separately on sperm and ovum. The trick to examining them nondestructively was to take advantage of the fact that the process of creating either throws off additional bodies with the genes not included which can be analyzed destructively to determine the genetic content of the gamete.
Obviously the gametes have to be produced in vitro for this to work. If it could be done it would be a much more powerful technology than selecting on embryos.
This is completely mind-blowing to me. Why are there not more governments funding this? I can't think of many things that would have a better return on investment for a country than increasing the average IQ of its citizens.
Thanks for the links.
I've been familiar with Hsu's work for a while now, but somehow I've never seen the Shulman 2014 paper! I'd always implicitly assumed that embryonic selection would have to be "slow"--you could only select among embryos created from the gametes of the parents. And if you wanted to do another IQ selection event, you would have to wait for the embryo to reach the age of sexual maturity, and then repeat the process.
But if you can use stem cells to create gametes derived from selected embryos...what is even the upper bound there? 30 IQ points? Even more?