The Best of LessWrong

My wife completed two cycles of IVF this year, and we had the sequence data from the preimplantation genetic testing on the resulting embryos analyzed for polygenic factors by the unnamed startup mentioned in this post. I can personally confirm that the practical advice in this post is generally excellent. The basic IVF + testing process is pretty straightforward (if expensive), but navigating the medical bureaucracy can be a hassle once you want to do anything unusual (like using a non-default PGT provider), and many clinics aren't going to help you with anything to do with polygenic screening, even if they are open to it in principle. So knowing exactly what you want and what you need to ask for is key. Since this post was written, there have been lots of other developments and related posts in this general area: * Significantly Enhancing Adult Intelligence With Gene Editing May Be Possible * Superbabies: Putting The Pieces Together * Gameto Announces World’s First Live Birth Using Fertilo Procedure that Matures Eggs Outside the Body * Overview of strong human intelligence amplification methods: Genomic approaches And probably many others I am forgetting. But if you're a prospective parent looking for practical advice on how to navigate the IVF process and take advantage of the latest in genetic screening technology, this post is still the best place to start that I know of. Some of the things in the list above are more speculative, but the technology for selection is basically ready and practical now, and the effect size doesn't have to be very large for it to beat the status quo of having an embryologist eyeball it. I think this post is a slam dunk for a +9 and a spot in the LW canon, both for its object-level information and its exemplary embodiment of the virtue of empiricism and instrumental rationality. The rest of this review details my own experience with IVF in the U.S. in 2024. ---------------------------------------- This section of the orig