

DNA Blueprint for Fetus Built Using Samples From Parents - rkaplan
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/07/health/tests-of-parents-are-used-to-map-genes-of-a-fetus.html?hp

======
tantalor
98% accuracy? I'm afraid you're going to have to do a lot better than that,
humans and chimps have 94% identical DNA[1] and they're 5-7 million years
apart[2]. 98% might as well be any two humans.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee> [2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee-
human_last_common_an...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee-
human_last_common_ancestor)

------
aaronbrethorst
Gattaca: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca>

~~~
cjbprime
I'm not sure how serious you're being. Assuming full seriousness:

In Gattaca, parents somehow got to choose between thousands of potential
embryos to maximize chosen traits. This is not biologically plausible; even in
IVF, you only get to choose between a few embryos, so you could never have
anything like as much control over abilities and health as we saw in Gattaca.
The most realistic use of embryo selection is so that you could simply make
sure that -- for diseases where you're a carrier and had a 50/50 chance of
passing them on to your children -- you choose the embryos without the
pathogenic mutation.

In this new paper's technique, you just get an abort/don't abort decision over
your fetus after seeing what is probably its genetic sequence. We already give
parents this decision via amniocentesis. It seems unlikely that people will
attempt to go to great lengths to get "the perfect" fetus this way, because
one fetus at a time doesn't give you many options to choose between.

More likely, we'll just move from "sometimes parents abort fetuses if they're
going to have Down's or some other grave disease" to "sometimes parents abort
fetuses if they're going to have a serious genetic disease". This doesn't
bother me much, nor does it seem to have much of anything in common with
Gattaca.

~~~
shard
Well a woman is born with 1-2 million immature eggs. Imagine harvesting a few
hundred thousand, maturing them, and fertilizing them. This is the part we
haven't figured out yet.

