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“For the future, and perhaps forever, this technology will only be available to the already wealthy or otherwise privileged,” Meyer says. “As long as it makes an impact and gives encouragement to any race [this] It is not something that is equally accessible to everyone. Just as wealth is inherited, these are literally inherited things. You can imagine the spiral in which this spirals across generations and exacerbates socioeconomic gaps.
Academic success
The new poll compared people’s willingness to improve their children’s chances in three ways: using SAT prep courses, fetal testing and gene editing in embryos. Even the most radical option, the genetic modification of children, which is banned in the US and many other countries, has received significant support. About 28% of those asked said they would probably do that if it was safe.
“These are important results. They support the existence of a gap between the generally negative view of researchers and health professionals and the view of the general public,” says Shai Karmi, a geneticist and statistician who studies embryo selection technology at the Hebrew University in Israel.
The authors of the new poll are grappling with the results of a series of large studies to find the genetic causes of human social and cognitive traits, including sexual orientation and intelligence. That includes a report published last year that looked at how far more than 3 million people differed in their DNA at school, a lifelong outcome linked to a person’s intelligence.
The result of the study is the so-called “polygenic score”, or a genetic test that can predict from genes – among other things – whether a person will be more or less likely to go to college.
Of course there are many environmental factors, and DNA is not destiny. However, genetic tests are surprisingly predictive. In their study, the researchers reported that only about 3% of the 100 children were expected to go to the top college. By selecting one of the 10 IVF embryos with the highest gene score, parents increase that chance to 5% for their child.
It’s tempting to dismiss the benefits they found as insignificant, but assuming they’re right, it’s a “very large relative increase” in the likelihood of the child in question going to such a school — about 67 percent, according to Carmi.
Consumer polygenic predictive tests for several traits are already available from 23andMe. That company, for example, offers a “weight report” that predicts a person’s body mass index. Karmi education predictions and body-mass predictions have similar accuracy.
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