IVF
Article
IVF is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between July 01, 2021 and September 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “if you’re doing IVF, you have to choose an embryo anyway”; “to research IVF clinic success rates”; “once you’re already doing IVF, selecting the embryos”. It most often appears alongside Metacelsus, Sam Altman, 1DaySooner.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: July 01, 2021
- Last seen: September 09, 2024
Appears In
- Welcome Polygenically Screened Babies
- ACX Grants Results 2024
- Who Does Polygenic Selection Help?
- Open Thread 346
Related Pages
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- Metacelsus (2 shared issues)
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- Sam Altman (2 shared issues)
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- 1DaySooner (1 shared issues)
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- 23andme (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- ACX Book Review (1 shared issues)
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- ACX Grants (1 shared issues)
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- ACX Grants (1 shared issues)
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- African School of Economics (1 shared issues)
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- Alabama (1 shared issues)
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- Alaska (1 shared issues)
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- Alex (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Are these levels of reductions “worth it”? I think the company has a pretty good pitch, which is - if you’re doing IVF, you have to choose an embryo anyway. If you don’t screen, you’re going to choose one at random. So why not instead choose one in a way that halves your future kid’s risk of serious diseases? Of course, “worth it” depends on the price, which the company is kind of coy about, but an earlier version seems to have cost ~$1400 plus some extra per embryo, which is a fraction of overall IVF costs and pretty cheap for a US medical procedure
Inline links: an earlier version
Samuel Celarek, $20,000, to research IVF clinic success rates, with the ultimate goal of creating a company that ranks the best IVF clinics. Evaluator opinion was split on this one: is this really an effective charitable cause? I funded it anyway for three reasons. First, the team came very heavily recommended. Second, this grant has a chance of causing a few dozen to a few thousand extra well-loved developed-world children to exist; I’m not exactly a total-utilitarian pronatalist but I can abstractly bargain with them. Third, this grant could improve the IVF ecosystem, and getting lots of people to use IVF is a prerequisite to high-impact reproductive technologies like polygenic screening.
But even this isn’t an argument against polygenic selection. It’s an argument against IVF in general, which usually involves production of more embryos than the couple intend to bring to term. As in Situation 2, usually the doctor chooses the most robust looking one that they have a good feeling about, and throws away the others. An Alabama court made this argument on anti-abortion grounds recently. But once you’re already doing IVF, selecting the embryos based on some criterion, like low schizophrenia risk, doesn’t make this issue any worse.
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.