Key points:
- 28% of survey respondents said they would use gene editing to increase the odds of their child being admitted to a top-100 ranked college someday.
- 38% said they would use polygenic screening, which is used right not by private companies to estimate disease risk during IVF.
- The research team says the time for a national conversation about possible regulation of polygenic embryo screening is now.
An article published in Science indicates that a substantial proportion of Americans are willing to use an essentially unregulated reproductive genetic technology to increase the chances of having a baby who is someday admitted to a top-100 ranked college.
The article is based on a survey conducted on a large, nationally representative sample of Americans by researchers from Geisinger Health System, University of Southern California, UCLA, National Bureau of Economic Research and Harvard University.
They survey asked respondents how likely they were to use polygenic screening, CRISPR-style gene editing, or standard SAT prep course training to increase the odds of their child getting into a top-100 ranked college, assuming that they were already using IVF and that all options were free and safe.
A majority of people (68%) said they were more likely than not to use SAT prep; substantial minorities were more likely than not to use gene editing (28%) and polygenic screening (38%) for this purpose. And people who were told that most people in a position to use each service choose to do so were more likely to say that they, too, would use it, suggesting the potential for a modest “bandwagon effect.”
Polygenic indexes (also called polygenic risk scores) can provide an estimate of disease risk—or other traits—based on an individual’s genes. Private companies working with IVF clinics offer the service to patients who can select an embryo with a lower chance of developing diabetes, cancer, heart disease, inflammatory bowel disease, Alzheimer’s disease or schizophrenia as an adult.
Some patients have also reported uploading their embryos’ genomic data to online platforms that make predictions about non-medical traits, and the founder of one such company has not ruled out offering to screen for non-medical traits.
As technology continues to advance rapidly, the research team says the time for a national conversation about possible regulation of polygenic embryo screening is now.
“Polygenic indexes are already only weak predictors for most individual adult outcomes, especially for social and behavioral traits, and there are several factors that lower their predictive power even more in the context of embryo selection,” said senior author Patrick Turley, assistant research professor of economics at USC. “Polygenic indexes are designed to work in a different setting than an IVF clinic. These weak predictors will perform even worse when used to select embryos.”
Information provided by Geisinger Health System.