I believe down syndrome is caused by a chromosome disorder, which is covered in the blog post. Risk does indeed rise sharply with maternal age past ~35.
I just spoke to someone at Orchid who says their basic pricing is $2,500 per embyro for their most thorough testing, but they do have some sort of volume discount. They didn't tell me when the discount kicks in.
Not sure if you saw the full post at the link, but some absolute risks, such as for miscarriage, are much higher. And for me personally a 1% risk of having a child with a serious mental disability is really scary. Perhaps not for you.
Excerpt:
I had my first child when I was 36 years old, which made me want to understand the risks of having children at different ages. Before looking into this, my impression was that the main biological problems with old-age parenthood had to do with not having the necessary health and vigor to care for young’uns, and I had heard that older women have trouble getting pregnant. While those are real issues, there are many others worthy of consideration.
My read of the evidence is that the risks of miscarriage and serious health problems for children, including autism and birth defects, increase significantly with parental (both paternal and maternal) age. The data I could find for most risks is not very fine-grained and not very precise, but I think this qualitative description matches the data: Risks start rising at around 30 years old for both mothers and fathers, rises gradually through about 35 for mothers and 40 for fathers, and then sharply after that.
Specifically, after self-supervised pretraining, an LLM outputs exactly the thing that it expects to see. (After RLHF, that is no longer strictly true, but RLHF is just a fine-tuning step, most of the behavioral inclinations are coming from pretraining IMO.)
Qualitatively the differences between a purely predictively-trained LLM and one after RLHF seems quite large (e.g., see the comparison between GPT-3 and InstructGPT examples from OpenAI).
I have a friend who's a geneticist and is much more pessimistic about the expected impact of embryo selection on a given desired trait. I chatted with him and read some papers he suggested and I now have a lower estimate of the expected value of embryo selection than before.
Very curious to hear from other experts in this field who disagree, especially those who don't have a financial conflict of interest!
It seems it's quite unclear how to even measure how heritable a given trait is, with different methods giving wildly different answers. And even if a trait is highly heritable:
Thanks for this awesome post. Biggest update for me is "there might be a way to get screening for traits not advertised by Genomic Prediction", but I still have no idea of the cost or the probability of success :-) Would be great to hear from people who have more info on this.
I recently weighed the pros and cons of IVF vs old-fashioned conception and went old-fashioned because:
1. This article claims "different embryo culture media give rise to different birthweights and growth patterns in children" and "children born after ART have altered epigenetic profiles". I'm not an expert but I read it and found it quite plausible that there are ways that... (read more)
This article claims "different embryo culture media give rise to different birthweights and growth patterns in children" and "children born after ART have altered epigenetic profiles".
I'm not an expert but I read it and found it quite plausible that there are ways that IVF can cause worse health outcomes. Would love to read a thorough critique of it!
Posting this here since I found it useful.
I think the really worth-while stuff is in the section "When Is Parenthood Associated With Well-Being?
Exploring Moderators" which starts on page 33.
Posting this here since I found it useful.
I think the really worth-while stuff is in the section "When Is Parenthood Associated With Well-Being?
Exploring Moderators" which starts on page 33.
Has anyone found good data or have an informed guesstimate on what fraction of kids who are non-verbal or minimally verbal at age X, will become verbal by age Y?
I found this old (1987) study by D. Bishop, and A. Edmundson which says:
"87 language-impaired children were assessed at the ages of 4, 4 1/2, and 5 1/2 years on a battery of language measures. In 37% of children, who were termed the "good outcome group," the language disorder had resolved by the age of 5 1/2 years so that children were indistinguishable from a control group. "
There's probably something more recent / or better. Thanks!