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Manufacturing Our Designer Babies (Feat. Jonathan Anomaly)
Malcolm and Simone Collins sit down with Jonathan Anomaly (Director of Research & Communication at Herasight) to finally reveal the company they’ve been quietly working with for years on embryo genetic selection.
After years of secrecy, we dive deep into:
* How Herasight achieves dramatically superior polygenic risk scores compared to competitors
* The recent drama and plagiarism allegations surrounding Nucleus Genomics
* Why selecting for higher intelligence correlates with better health, lower addiction rates, more cooperative behavior, and overall life success
* The truth about pleiotropy: why selecting for positive traits almost never comes with serious downsides
* How Herasight’s patented technology allows parents anywhere in the world (even where PGT-P is banned) to get polygenic embryo reports
* The coming era of germline gene editing and why refusing these technologies may soon be seen as morally irresponsible
* Why this technology is fundamentally pro-natalist and will help high-fertility families have healthier, thriving children
This is one of the most important conversations happening right now about the future of humanity.
Learn more about Herasight here
Episode Transcript: Malcolm Collins: . [00:00:00] Hello. I am excited to be here today because today we can talk about something that we have had to keep quiet for years which is, if you know the Collins family lore, it’s that we did a large batch of embryos because we had to, Simone was unable to get pregnant naturally, and we then did genetic sequencing on them to decide the order in which we did the implantation.
Now. For a long time we just had to say that we did this with a group of scientists. And when people were like, well, so people use this company or this company, we say, well, the company that they should probably be using isn’t out there yet. And the reason why this is really important when we’re talking about independent companies with good genetic data on humans is as time has gone on, the genetic data that is held in the public sphere by scientists and everything like that is.
Decreasing in quality. And specifically what I mean by this is there was a, the famous case where the national Biobank [00:01:00] in the UK ended up closing off their genetic access to a lot of publishers because one scientist accidentally found that one group was in the United States, was having daughter within the uk Your daughters
Simone Collins: within the uk Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: in the uk.
Something like 14000% the rate of any other group. And that was a naughty fact. And so now they’re like, now we need to screen all research for anything that could be naughty facts. The problem is, is that naughty facts are the facts we really need for humanity to move forwards, which includes things like genetic correlates to intelligence.
And the reason why I have been so impressed by this company, and, and it’s the reason we’re gonna be doing this and talking about this, not just about their work around intelligence and their work around the correlates to intelligence, which is really interesting because almost everything is correlated with intelligence.
So if you’re selecting for, if you’re like. I as a country will not allow people to select for intelligence. I will only allow heart health. You are also selecting for intelligence because these, these things are highly correlated with each other. So we’re gonna go into that. We’re gonna go into intelligence associations with social behavior patterns and everything like that because [00:02:00] obviously that’s important.
And we’re a
Published on 1 day, 10 hours ago