Meet the US families crafting the perfect embryo with genetic testing • FRANCE 24 English

Meet the US families crafting the perfect embryo with genetic testing • FRANCE 24 English

What if it were possible to handpick the eye color hair type or personality traits over unborn children by selecting an embryo with DNA that matched the parents criteria the Collins family did just that when they underwent IVF for their youngest children right you want to jump

And this one isn’t one yet and she is Titan and victus Collins and right now my wife is pregnant with industry americ Collins to increase their chances of having a healthy child the couple asked a lab to analyze the embryos before fertilization this is called a polygenic

Test this basically gives you an overall health score and it gives you a picture of the overall risk for certain health conditions so genomic prediction specifically gives information for type one and type two diabetes heart attack schizophrenia but Simon Collins went a step further she asked a second lab to

Analyze mental health risks to be sure of selecting the best performing embryo but her scores are on mental health so risk of depression anxiety brain fog inability to deal with stress mood swings all of these risks were really low the collinses reject accusations they have rebranded Eugenics saying

Every family has the right to choose desired traits for its Offspring the couple are a part of the pronatalist movement an ideology that promotes repopulating the Earth by having as many children as possible while guaranteeing the survival of communities our goal is to to preserve and expand diversity so for example

South Koreans moving in a very bad Direction but if 15 families manag to become pronatalist and are equipped to have large families and pass down a culture to their children that encourages them to have large families and so on and so forth South Korean culture is preserved another member of the

Pronatalist movement billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk who has 11 children with five conceived via IVF the biggest problem the world will face in 20 years is population collapse like a low birth rate is is a slow death for civilization yes make more babies at least up babies to sustain the

Population ideas which are currently very much in Vogue in Valley circles prompting more and more wealthy young parents to turn to this lab on this side we we have um two of our major Technologies quantitative realtime PCR we do a lot of work on monogenic disease a lot of patients will

Go through IVF to prevent passing on those diseases to their children this is where the DNA of future embryos is analyzed tiny fragments that must first be magnified in this situation we look at over 800 100,000 positions in the genome and and that type of information

Over the whole genome then allows us to make predictions about polygenic risk monogenic disease the lab then allows parents to choose the sex of their child a practice baned in France though possible for medical reasons in some European countries such as Greece and Switzerland each embryo is scored for

Disease probability a technique that the co-founder defends and hopes to expand in the future we would not be here if we didn’t push the limit a little bit so I can understand people’s discomfort with potential companies not ours we would not be doing that but looking to select

For certain traits but it’s really the advancement in the science however it’s far from an exact science in the Long Haul there’s no guarantee of good health both physically and mentally because external factors play such a decisive role in human development why we solve these problem it depends on uh the environment in

Which you were raised your family context your socioeconomic status more than anything so reducing us to our DNA and selecting what children to have with the expectation that we can select the best children based on their DNA is ethically dangerous misguided with the recent development of genetic scissors

Allowing scientists to snip and Replace defective links in DNA rewriting the code of life well before birth could soon be possible

While most industrialised countries are concerned about dwindling birth rates, some people in the US are determined to repopulate the world by having as many children as possible. A growing movement of “pronatalists” is centred around Silicon Valley, spearheaded by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. These parents are paying laboratories to analyse and select the best-performing embryos before undergoing IVF, in order to have children in perfect health or with specific genetic criteria. Our France 2 colleagues report, with FRANCE 24’s Catherine Khedir-Clifford.
#pronatalists #genetics #IVF

Read more about this story in our article: https://f24.my/A3zG.y

🔔 Subscribe to France 24 now: https://f24.my/YTen
🔴 LIVE – Watch FRANCE 24 English 24/7 here: https://f24.my/YTliveEN

🌍 Read the latest International News and Top Stories: https://www.france24.com/en/

Like us on Facebook: https://f24.my/FBen
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://f24.my/Xen
Browse the news in pictures on Instagram: https://f24.my/IGen
Discover our TikTok videos: https://f24.my/TKen
Get the latest top stories on Telegram: https://f24.my/TGen