The language on Joh Hopkins website is being deliberately conservative. The reality is we have almost no data on eggs that have been frozen longer than 10 years, so they say 10 years becuase we don't have direct evidence for them being viable longer. What data we do have on eggs that have been frozen and then used after 4-8 years indicates time frozen has no effect on survival rates or fertilization rates. It would be very surprising to me if there's no impact on survival after 8 years, but at 10 years they suddenly start to degrade.
You can look a little further afield for more direct evidence of the long-term efficacy of freezing for fertility preservation. There are some neat animal studies in which sperm frozen for 50 years was used to create sheep, with the authors noting that the pregnancy rate of the frozen semen was identical to the pregnancy rate for the fresh semen.
My best guess is you'd see essentially zero degradation from longer freezing periods.
1Flag proposal:
Reasons why I think this is a good flag:
- It's simple
- It communicates the message
- People will be reminded of it every time they see a stop sign, which is a lot
I think perhaps part of the reason this post didn't get reviewed is because it's kind of a compressed version of a post I wrote later which can be seen here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DfrSZaf3JC8vJdbZL/how-to-make-superbabies
Maybe worth reviewing this one independently. But both posts more or less came from the same talk at LessOnline 2024.
This was perhaps an understandable viewpoint to hold in June when the best publicly available IQ predictor from the EA4 study only correlated with actual IQ at .3 in the general population (and less within family, which is what matters for embryo selection).
I happened to have spoken with some of the people from Herasight at the time and knew they had a predictor that performed quite a bit better than what was publicly available, which is where my optimism was coming from.
In October they finally published their validation white paper so now I can point to something other than private conversations to show you really can get as big of a boost as claimed.
Some people are still skeptical. Sasha Gusev for example has claimed that Herasight applied a “fudge factor” to get to 20% of variance explained by adjusting adjusting for the noisiness of the UKBB and ABCD cohorts. This is based on the fact that their raw predictor explained 13.7% of the within-family variance, and they applied an "adjustment factor" to that based on the fact that the test they validated on only has a test-retest correlation of .61.
I don't find the critique all that convincing, though my knowledge in the reliability of different psychometric methods is still pretty limited so take my opinion with a grain of salt. It's well known that UKBB's fluid intelligence test is pretty noisy, and the method they used to correct for that (disattenuation) seems pretty bog-standard.
They also published a follow-up in which they used another method, latent variable modeling, which produced similar results.
All that being said, it would be better if there were third-party benchmarks like we have in the AI field to evaluate the relative strength of all these different predictors.
I think it's probably about time to create or fund an org to do this kind of thing. We need something like METR or MLPerf for genetic predictors. No such benchmarks exist right now.
This is actually a real problem. No dataset exists right now that we can guarantee hasn't been used in the training of these models. And while I basically believe that most of these companies have done their evaluations honestly (with the possible exception of Nucleus), relying on companies honestly reporting predictor performance when they have an economic incentive to exaggerate or cheat is not ideal.
I think you could actuallly start out with an incredibly small dataset. Even just 100 samples would be enough to make a binary "bullshit" or "plausible" validation set on continuous value predictors like height or IQ.
Yes, please DM!
I'm thinking about writing a practical guide to having polygenically screened children (AKA superbabies) in 2025. You can now increase your kids IQ by about 4-10 points and/or decrease their risk of some pretty serious diseases by doing IVF and picking an embryo with better genetic predispositions.
There's a bunch of little shit almost no one knows that can have a pretty significant impact on the success rates of the process like how to find a good clinic, what kinds of questions to ask your physician, how to get meds cheaply, how to get the most euploid embryos per dollar, which polygenic embryo selection company to pick etc.
Would anyone find this useful?
3Do you think head transplants on to repeatedly cloned bodies could work as life extension? Even without genetic improvements to increase longevity, I can imagine switching bodies every 20-50 years becoming mundane with nearly modern surgical techniques provided we can reconnect the nervous system.
Yes, I think head transplants could extend lifespan pretty significantly if you can do them safely (they're currently super dangerous), but I don't think it would extend lifespan indefinitely. The brain itself ages, so unless you have a means of gradually replacing brain tissue a la Jean Hebert, you're not going to get to indefinite lifespan extension.
Related to this, do you think parabiosis would work without all the body switching?
I mean... would you WANT your circulatory system hooked up to that of someone else? Sounds gross, weird and extremely inconvenient to me, even if you're the one benefitting.
I can see blood transfusions if you can make artificial blood. But I can't see parabiosis ever being a thing unless it's in some exceptional circumstances.
There's another interesting question related to this one which has to do with creating a gene edited clone of yourself.
If we can make an embryo from one of your stem cells, we could potentially do substantial editing of it to enhance it in various ways (perhaps to reduce disease risk or increase intelligence).
How many edits would one need to make before it is no longer really a clone of you?
What if instead we grew a genetically enhanced replacement body for you with no knee issues and better cardiovascular performance? Are you still you with a new body?
There are all kinds of interesting questions that arise with sufficiently powerful biotech. Most people don't spend much time thining about them because the tech to make them relevant is a ways off.
I'd appreciate if you could provide links to "clear evidence of its writing style across all of these surfaces, and the entire.. vibe of the campaign feels like it was completely synthesized by 4o"
I understand it may be hard to definitively show this but anything you can show would be helpful.
Yeah, this is fair. My personal take is that polygenic embryo selection changes the calculus a fair bit. A good third of my friends are now having children via IVF just to get access to embryo selection. If you're going to do that anyways, then freezing eggs at a younger age starts to become a bit of a no-brainer.