Eugenics, statistical hubris, and unknowable unknowns in human genetics
A new paper just out in Nature , by Peter Visscher and colleagues (including bio-ethicist Julian Salvulescu) explores the idea of polygenic genome editing of human embryos to reduce the risk of common diseases. This is, to say the least, a controversial idea, and a decidedly fantastical one. The authors present the results of statistical modelling which suggests that editing a small number of risk variants in each embryo’s genome could dramatically reduce the risk of a number of common disorders. But there are good reasons (lots of them) to doubt the assumptions on which this modelling is based and to have serious concerns about possibly deleterious unintended consequences of such interventions. I co-wrote a commentary on the article with geneticist Shai Carmi and law professor and bio-ethicist Hank Greely, outlining some of the limitations of the modelling and our concerns over the dangers of the proposed approach. I’ll expand on those points here. First, the development...