I've been advising you guys now for ages, and I think I became convinced that this could be a

technology for good, probably ever since our first conversation, a few years ago now.

A few years ago, yeah.

Why do a lot of people still have such an issue with embryo selection, do you think?

Let's see, there's probably a few issues.

One is it's still a new technology.

Any new technology that hasn't been fully explained to the public, even to doctors,

is going to have some, I think, justifiable skepticism.

Another reason is people worry about tinkering with the human genome, which we're not doing,

but people often, I suppose, confuse embryo selection with gene editing right

so what we're doing um the company harrisite is when women do ivf they they can already get a

bunch of different genetic tests they could test for uh down syndrome that's called anuploidy

they can test for single gene

disorders. That's PGTM pre-implantation genetic testing for monogenic conditions. We're just doing

polygenic conditions. All we're doing is revealing more information about the natural genetic

variation that exists in your embryos and letting you choose which one to implant.

But when we explain that to people, sometimes they think that what you're doing is you're adding new genes or you're editing the existing genes, and so I think they worry about that.

So what's going on? How much do we know about the genome? What are you doing to tinker with it? But in fact, we're not tinkering with anything. So that's probably the main reason people worry. Scott Alexander did a great blog post on this. He had this wonderful example. He says, a woman goes in for IVF. She produces 10 embryos. The usual technique for deciding which of these 10 embryos to implant is for a doctor to look them over and see which one looks generally the most normally shaped and healthiest. Is this right? It is. And it's not that there's no correlation whatsoever between, let's say, the morphology or the shape of the embryo and its viability, but there's probably not a huge correlation. Right. But my point here is that there is all, if you're doing IVF, and I think between sort of one and three percent of babies in the US are born through IVF at the moment.

Yeah, I think it's at least a few percent.

Okay.

In Denmark, it's 10 percent.

Right.

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