Should every baby's DNA be sequenced?

You cannot undo anything that's history, including not testing. If you missed a chance to get other tests or treatment early in life, you don't get the chance to fix that later either.

It would be easier to be cautious on penetrance, and reevaluate later, than to never collect the data and hope something changes. The number of these calls to limit our access to data are piling up, and they shouldn't be taken one at a time.

https://substack.norabble.com/p/more-data-please

The problem is "eugenics" has two meanings which is unhelpful for this discussion.

1) criminal practices of forced sterilisations, ethnic cleansing and mass assassinations to phase out undesired genes

2) the more generic practice of trying to improve the genetic characteristics of your children.

I don't think there is much point in debating 1). But we would be naive to think we are not already doing 2). What else is a prenatal test for down syndrome? What else is selecting your mating partner for desirable characteristics? In animals it's called breeding and it works pretty well. And if you can patch the DNA of your kids to remove potential risks of cancers or other deficiencies, why wouldn't you? Is it better to let cancer take its toll?

You say it like applying that label automatically makes it a bad thing.

See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck for an elaboration.

That's why at-home sequencing should become the norm.

But to be fair, I see no issues with genetic testing of embryos that could still be aborted. If a person would grow up with a serious illness it could be considered. But then genetic modification should be accessible too, to preserve the life but update the code.

Eugenics was rebranded "Genetics" after the war.

We're turning into bananas.

> Almost all commercially sold bananas (the Cavendish variety) are exact genetic clones

We shouldn't let biology and genetics be forever kept hostage by the fact that 100 years ago some racists (who did not even know what DNA was) used crude mechanisms like castration to push their specific forms of social engineering.

There is a lot of potential problems written into your exome, and some of them can be prevented. Treating a condition which has already taken hold is much more complicated and often less successful. Personalized medicine is pretty much the only way forward nowadays.

Is it malicious to abort a baby before it has a heartbeat at six weeks because it will have Downs syndrome?

there's nothing wrong with eugenics as long as it isn't forced.

yes, yes, the Nazis did it. and Hitler was a vegan dog dad.

Some people unfortunately are far too willing to exchange a sense of "security" or "justice" for (effectively) all of their privacy.

A large part of that, IMHO, comes from mass media outright programming people to be afraid. Fear sells, and authoritarian politicians are more than willing to capitalize on selling the "solution".

Especially in something as squishy as biology. A field famous for withholding any kind of certainty.

Sure, DNA seems like something that is 'real' and 'grounded', but once you get into the specifics of even sample collection and handling, those little errors in the Gaussian distributions start adding up (in quadrature!) and it is surprising how fast the error bars end up swamping any kind of knowledge.

Can I mention the irony that this seems a "bit" paranoid? "bit" because, yes, you do have some good examples of failures to call to, but still, consider how much good would have to be chucked to have avoided those by a general aversion to not record any data at all. You're fear that it will lead to poor outcomes didn't ask what's given up.. whether there might be good outcomes. A rational, bounded set of fears (not paranoid), would have to consider those possibilities too. When I do that I come to the belief that the responses to those fears live at a higher level.. being careful about how we store data, being careful about how we interpret data, being careful about how we communicate data. The answer is not being afraid to gather data.

https://substack.norabble.com/p/more-data-please

your class C adolescent has been identified as being an eligible kidney donor for a Class B worker, congratulations! please book into your nearest hospital within 2 days

Or Gattaca.

I also liked seeing Huxley here too. It’s great what seems to be have lost that’s shy of 100 years being published.

"And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. "

Isn't this actually happening to us right now, but not via genetics/eugenics, rather by being glued to screens and consuming brainrot?

We're always vigilant against hypothetical problems while pooh-pooing the ones that are unfolding right in front of our eyes.

I have close friends that has quite serious genetic diseases in the family, ones they passed on to their children too. In that, they are in and out of the hospital all the time. And yes, the disease is degenerative.

I know that they went out of their way to a company that does not store genetic info for their sequencing.

In talking with them, they are also very against any form of this screening. The risks of the disease are very bad, but they feel on a population level that the risks of abuse by insurances or governments are much higher, per what they have told me.