A newly available kind of genetic testing, called polygenic embryo screening, promises to screen for conditions that can include cancer, obesity, autism, bipolar disorder, even celiac disease. These conditions are informed by many genetic variants and environmental factors - so companies like Orchid and Heliospect assign risk scores to each embryo for a given condition. These tests are expensive, only available through IVF, and some researchers question how these risk scores are calculated. But what would it mean culturally if more people tried to screen out some of these conditions? And how does this connect to societal ideas about whose lives are meaningful? Brittany gets into it with Vardit Ravitsky, senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School and president of the Hastings Center, a non-partisan bioethics research center, and Katie Hasson, associate director of the Center for Genetics and Society, a nonprofit public affairs organization that advocates for responsible use of genetic technology.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.
Brittany, there's this drive to make sure that your child is as successful as possible and a high achiever. And the way it translates to genetic selection is that we think, ooh, if we have a new tool to select the best embryo, I'm ethically obligated to do that, just like I'm ethically obligated to pay for tutoring and violin classes and gymnastics competitions.
Like if you have the means, then why not?
Exactly. Have you seen the movie Gattaca? The 1997 sleeper hit movie shows a society where every person is born through genetic selection for the best possible genes. And in the film, Ethan Hawke plays a guy who was conceived the traditional way, who steals someone else's identity to achieve his dream of becoming an astronaut because his own genes were deemed inferior.
Jerome Morrow, navigator first class, is about to embark on a one-year manned mission to Titan. A highly prestigious assignment, although for Jerome, selection was virtually guaranteed at birth. No, there is truly nothing remarkable about the progress of Jerome Morrow. Except that I am not Jerome Morrow.
The reason I'm bringing up this nearly 30-year-old movie is because of this newly available technology called polygenic embryo screening. I've been hearing some comparisons of this technology to Gattaca.
So somebody actually wrote a narrative of what society would look like if IVF plus polygenic screening becomes the norm. And it's a nightmare.
That's Vardit Ravitsky, senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School and president of the Hastings Center, a nonpartisan bioethics research center. The genetic testing we typically already use on embryos came out just a few years before Gattaca. And it usually looks for specific conditions that have really clear single gene causes, like Tay-Sachs disease, which is very painful and deadly.
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