Comment on This Woman Will Decide Which Babies Are Born

• 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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    • snooggums@midwest.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      She also didn’t understand the question about of her mom had been screned out then what would she think about not existing, and she said that there would just be a different version of herself.

      She think she would exist if her mother did not.

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      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        It was a dumb answer to IMO a dumb question. Embryo screening won’t affect anyone who has already been born unless it gets combined with some kind of time travel.

        Yes, filtering out embryos will mean that entire potential family lines won’t exist, but other new potentials will replace them, assuming they weren’t going to be randomly selected in the first place.

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      • Syn_Attck@lemmy.today ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        She knew full well, she was just playing ignorant since she knew it would be printed. better to play dumb while you think of something to say than to give ammunition to your opponents

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