Exploring the Ethics of Polygenic Embryo Screening

What: This is part two of three in the New York Times’ deep dive into IVF, this time focusing on the rise of polygenic embryo screening. It’s a technology used to assess the genetic risks and traits of embryos, and the piece looks at the ethics and potential consequences of picking embryos based on probabilities driven by genetic factors.

Key Line: “The usefulness of polygenic risk scoring in adults is still an open question; its application to embryos is even less straightforward. Because the results are probabilistic, having a slightly elevated risk of a condition does not necessarily translate into developing it. The risk calculus is further complicated by the vastly different environment for a child born today compared with the adults whose biological samples, the large-scale collection of which began in the mid-2000s, make up the data sets from which these risk scores are generated.”

Source: The New York Times