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Comment on This Woman Will Decide Which Babies Are Born

jimmydoreisalefty@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

How much does an Orchid screening cost?

It’s $2,500 per embryo.

And presumably you’d be screening several embryos. What about for families that can’t afford that?

We have a philanthropic program, so people can apply to that, and we’re excited to accept as many cases as we can.

I must now ask a question I’ve been dreading. I’m sorry in advance. Here goes. It’s the inevitable question about Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes.

No, this is the worst question. This is so mean.

Tell me why it’s so mean.

I find it sad. It’s a sad state of affairs where—my friends who aren’t even in health, they say they get it too. It’s like, any female CEO with any tech-adjacent thing is constantly being questioned—by the way, are you like this other fraud? Do you want to comment on this other random fraud that occurred that has absolutely nothing to do with you besides the person being the same gender as you?

If you’re trying to charitably understand where this question is coming from, how do you do that?

What would be the charitable interpretation—besides that our society is incredibly misogynistic and men’s frauds and failings are passed aside and when one female does it she stands for every other female CEO ever?

So there’s no charitable interpretation.

I don’t think there is. Society treats men as, like, default credible. For a woman, the default is skeptical.

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snooggums@midwest.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

It’s like, any female CEO with any tech-adjacent thing is constantly being questioned—by the way, are you like this other fraud?

This really sounds like she is admitting that this is fraud, and that she doesn’t like being compared to other fraud.

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- flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah, she didn’t really addressed fraud comparisons. Went straight to sexism. Both can be true, and if you are a CEO of a medical company you should be ready to prove your shit works.
  
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  - TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    If I (man) was being interviewed and the interviewer randomly said “hey, I read in the news a little while ago that a man committed fraud, and well, you’re a man too. Are you a fraud?”, I also wouldn’t dignify it with a response.
    
    If the interviewer had asked how the efficacy of this treatment has been confirmed, he’d have got an answer.
    
    Saying “hey, these other people with no link to you other than your genitals are frauds, and it makes me feel like going could be, so are you?” doesn’t deserve to be treated like a question asked in good faith.
    
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    snooggums@midwest.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    If they were committing nearly identical fraud it would be a good comparison.
    
    Did you read what she was claiming it could do with a minuscule sample and a fancy algorithm? That is exactly the same claim as Theranos.
    
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- dirthawker0@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  That “other” is the possible Freudian slip.
  
  But she does have somewhat of a point. Though it’s female and tech and medical - a closer comparison - women in tech leadership roles do get more questioned on their competence than do men.
  
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- Fal@yiffit.net ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Wtf? No. What relevance does theranos have to this company? Does the interviewer ask the same thing to any other bio tech CEO?
  
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  - snooggums@midwest.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The reason people are comparing her bullshit made up science crap to Theranos is because she is not a medical person promoting a medical thing that supposedly checks for thousands of times more things than established science with a minuscule sample. Somehow this caught on in a ton of places through being the new hotness and will most likely implode when it is proven to be snake oil in less than a decade.
    
    This is the exact same situation as Theranos.
    
    Plenty of existing companies, like 23andMe, already screen for BRCA variants.
    
    23andMe does an array. They only look at, I think, 44 BRCA variants of the 70,000. If you only look at a few, then you can give people false certainty.
    
    And they’re obviously not testing embryos.
    
    Yeah, they just do people.
    
    Whereas you sequence the entire genome of embryos—orders of magnitude more information, on both monogenic and polygenic conditions, than anything that’s ever been done before. Even your main competitor, Genomic Prediction, only does arrays of embryos, looking for specific things.
    
    Yeah. Whole genome is a big deal and a massive upgrade. You can mitigate risks for thousands of diseases that previously you weren’t able to detect. It’s kind of like a vaccine for everything that we know, genetic-wise, at once.
    
    And all off a very small amount of DNA.
    
    About 5 picograms per cell in an embryo sample. That’s a really, really tiny amount. From both a chemistry perspective and a computational perspective, we had to invent new things to make it so that you can recover whole-genome data.
    
    It’s fucking tech bro bullshit, and the fact that she shares a gender with the other high profile made up person is a coincidence. While there is something to be said about not pushing back on the men, the criticism of her totally not eugenics because it involves computers logic is completely warranted and the comparison is spot on.
    
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    Syn_Attck@lemmy.today ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I also liked this bit:
    
    But again, you think that’s unfair because of who your mom is. Because she suffers. Something about her suffering catalyzed in you the desire to end suffering in other people. Does that make sense?
    
    No, that doesn’t make sense. Unfortunately, not all disease is genetic. There will still be disease and suffering. We are not that much of an optimistic fantasy.
    
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- feedum_sneedson@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I think it’s that in the questioner’s mind, they have decided she is a fraud, and want to know if she’s like the other one.
  
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