Ben Podgursky
20
3
Ben Podgursky has not written any posts yet.
Ben Podgursky has not written any posts yet.
Hey @GeneSmith, really appreciate you putting this together. I wanted to throw in a few thoughts regarding monogenic disease (the disclaimer/context here is I lead engineering at Orchid, and we've put a lot of thought into our monogenic embryo screening).
The 1% risk of monogenic disease you cite above is pretty misaligned with most estimates of monogenic disease. It may be an old reference, or filtering for only catastrophic disease, but common estimates for monogenic screening yield in adults are between 3.5% and 18%:
The BabySeq project revealed unanticipated monogenic disease risks in 11% of newborn babies.
"My real answer to what went wrong is that our civilization is profoundly inadequate. We have lost our ability to do things."
This is the only conclusion I would challenge — we actually did do things, for a while. We locked down (almost) completely for a month. But the emerging consensus as the numbers resolved was that the disease wasn't catastrophic enough to shut down society over for a year, or two, or three.
Does this mean that we couldn't lock down and quarantine for a disease with a CFR of 20%? I don't know. Maybe, and if not, it would suck. Hopefully this disease has given us a trial run and the skill to actually do it. But I don't think especially evidence-based to extrapolate society's response to COVID-19 to diseases with a CFR > 1%.
I haven't read much at all about the Iterated Meiosis proposal but I'd be pretty concerned based on the current state of polygenic models that you end up selecting for a bunch of non-causal sites which were only selected as markers due to linkage disequlibrum (and iterated recombination makes the PRS a weaker and weaker predictor of the phenotype).