Genetics 05: Designer Babies

A company called Orchid provides the service of fertilizing babies outside of a mother (in vitro fertilization) and give it genetic tests to estimate the potential risks they might have in the future. This service is traditionally provided to those who have highly inheritable conditions, but Orchid provides it to parents who want to select the best embryo from them. This service receive skepticism because some diseases or conditions are polygenic conditions that are caused by multiple genes that are harder to trace back. There are also concerns about how the expense of the service might make it exclusive to wealthy people.

Polygenetic diseases are conditions contributed by multiple genes, and polygenetic risk scores is the system designed to calculate the likelihood of someone getting a polygenetic disease. Polygenetic risk scores are calculated by gathering a group of people with a certain condition and a group of healthy people and compare the patterns in their genes, through this process we can know about what patterns of genes are more likely to cause certain diseases. This method could only tell us what combinations of genes can cause certain condition without telling us how these genes actually work to increase the risks of a person. Another potential problems was that most of the samples collected in the world are contributed by people from the European region, which means the data we have might not be able to accurately represent the situation in the whole world.