James_Miller comments on Should I get genotyped? - Less Wrong

7 Post author: jsalvatier 24 October 2011 03:51PM

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Comment author: James_Miller 24 October 2011 05:26:15PM 5 points [-]

For me it's been mostly for fun. But consider if you could handle some very bad news such as finding out you had a much greater than normal chance of getting Alzheimer's disease.

You should definitely do it, however, if you intend to soon have children so you can see your carrier status for lots of diseases. If, for example, you are a carrier for cystic fibrosis then you should check to see if your mate is as well and then use embryo selection to guarantee that your child won't get the disease.

Comment author: [deleted] 26 October 2011 10:31:08AM 1 point [-]

Correction: If either you or your partner are carriers for any genetic diseases, use embryo screening to guarantee that your children won't get the diseases or be carriers.

Comment author: James_Miller 26 October 2011 02:30:51PM *  3 points [-]

I disagree. It wouldn't be so horrible if your children were merely carriers especially since by the time your children have children embryo selection tech or its successor will be much more advanced than it is today. True, if you were otherwise indifferent between (1) using an embryo that had one copy of the bad gene and one of the good one and (2) an embryo that had none of the bad genes you should go with (2) but this is extremely unlikely to happen since if you're going to use embryo selection you should look at far more than just that one "bad" gene.

Comment author: Phocion 01 November 2011 04:18:49AM 0 points [-]

With the large number of genetic diseases that exist, it seems improbable that neither you nor your partner would be a carrier for something. So your statement would imply that most couples should use embryo screening, and possibly go through thousands of embryos to find one that is free of any genetic defects. This seems both unnecessarily costly and also unwise- without knowing more about the human genome, we can't be sure that eliminating a defect wouldn't cause worse problems. For example, we know that carriers of sickle-cell anemia are more resistant to malaria. What other correlations would we miss through haphazardly screening out carriers of other diseases?

Of course, in a case like cystic fibrosis, embryo selection is the clear choice.