Amy Nordrum

And so people do need these personalized treatments.

So you might think about brain diseases or muscular dystrophy as potential candidates.

So, you know, over time, this could be something ideally that would be available to many more people with many more different kinds of very rare genetic disorders.

So a lot of times people going through IVF today, they have the option to scan embryos prior to implantation for genetic diseases if they have one that they do not wish to pass on to their

child.

And this has been done for years.

There's a lot of public support for this kind of thing.

And many parents choose to do that.

And then lately, we've also seen some companies start to advertise other services of similar kinds of tests saying, we're not just going to help you screen for severe genetic diseases that you might pass on, but we're going to help you actually pick your best embryo based on how intelligent that baby might grow up to be or their eye color or

or their height and your preferences for your child.

It goes into eugenics.

Yeah, there's a lot of people that see that in it and are concerned for that reason.

And then some of the companies providing this say that's not what we're doing.

We're actually giving parents choice over the, you know, the child that they have.

But, you know, there's also just scientific questions.

You know, a lot of the genetic disorders that this testing had provided guidance on were due to like a single gene or a single base within a gene.

Whereas these new traits that some of the companies are advertising, they kind of come from many different interactions of genes.

And so it's probability and there's no guarantee that some of the services would actually reliably give you the outcome that you're wanting to achieve.

Which, to their credit, some of the companies do acknowledge with disclaimers on their site.

And as your listeners probably know, we need more energy for all kinds of things in the future, whether it's heat pumps or AC or data centers.