Thanks for clarifying. If you ever pitch your ideas to potential investors or something, I recommend avoiding talking about hundreds of embryos, or at least acknowledging that this is unrealistic with current technologies before doing so. When reading, I was a bit worried that you might be divorced from reality, thinking in sci-fi terms, not knowing the basic realities about IVF. This made it difficult for me to trust other things you were saying about domains I know nothing about. Just letting you know in case it's helpful :)
I've just started reading and this seems very interesting and important. However, I find the discussion about embryos and scaling odd. I mean sentences like "If we had 500 embryos". Here is some quick info for women under 35, generated by ChatGPT:
A single egg collection usually retrieves 8-14 eggs. Out of those, only 4-6 embryos typically develop far enough to be tested, and about 50-60% of those will be genetically normal. This means that in most cases, only 2-4 embryos per cycle are actually viable for implantation.
Yes you're right. With current technology there's no way you could get anywhere close to 500 embryos. I know a couple trying to get 100 and even that seems crazy to me.
5-20 is more realistic for most people (and 5 is actually quite good if you have fertility issues).
But we wanted to show 500 edits to compare scaling of gene editing and embryo selection and there wasn't any easy way to do that without extending the graph for embryo selection.
7kave
There are various technologies that might let you make many more egg cells than are possible to retrieve from an IVF cycle. For example, you might be able to mature oocytes from an ovarian biopsy, or you might be able to turn skin cells into eggs.
Thanks for clarifying. If you ever pitch your ideas to potential investors or something, I recommend avoiding talking about hundreds of embryos, or at least acknowledging that this is unrealistic with current technologies before doing so. When reading, I was a bit worried that you might be divorced from reality, thinking in sci-fi terms, not knowing the basic realities about IVF. This made it difficult for me to trust other things you were saying about domains I know nothing about. Just letting you know in case it's helpful :)