Reprogenetics News Roundup #17
Reprogenetics News Roundup #17
Alabama ruling threatens IVF, Anomaly on genetic justice, Spanish pronatalist campaign, New Zealand fertility crash, heritability studies: brain activity, ADHD, trust, podcast with Razib Khan...
Welcome to the latest issue of the Reprogenetic News Roundup! Edited by Craig Willy. Highlights from this week’s edition:
Repro/genetics
Access to IVF threatened by Alabama court ruling that embryos are children
Jonathan Anomaly on ethnic differences in polygenic scores and genetic justice
Population Policies & Trends
Spanish pronatalist association launches “save the planet, have more children” campaign
New Zealand fertility rate lowest since World War II
Genetic Studies
Brain mapping: heritability of cognitive and emotion processing
Heritability of ADHD
Heritability of trust
Further Learning
Quillette podcast with Razib Khan on genetics
Repro/genetics
“Doctors and patients fearfully proceed with IVF after Alabama court rules embryos are children” (NBC News)
The Alabama state Supreme Court has ruled embryos created by IVF are considered children, sparking concerns that embryos that are destroyed or damaged could lead to civil liability.
Doctors are warning that women using IVF and their babies could face major health risks. Young cancer patients could lose the chance to build a future family if fertility clinics stop using frozen embryos.
“That is a possible reality,” said Dr. Irene Dimitriadis, a reproductive endocrinologist and infertility specialist. “It hurts me to think of it because that means we’re kind of going backwards in medicine.”
Some Alabama fertility clinics are halting operations, leaving patients in emotional limbo, as clinics and doctors in other states brace for what they fear will be similar rulings or legislation.
“The reason we are freezing embryos is to help ensure the health of the woman and the pregnancy and for the babies,” said Dr. Zev Williams, a fertility expert. “There are many cases where it is healthier for the pregnancy, the future child and for the mother to have embryos frozen.”
Freezing embryos for IVF became standard practice after the development of vitrification, a fast-freezing process that is safer for the embryo. While there’s still a risk of damage during the thawing process, doctors say there are fewer complications than the only other option, using fresh embryos.
About 2% of babies are conceived using assisted-reproductive technology in the United States.
Freezing embryos allows doctors to transfer one embryo at a time to the uterus. Before freezing technology was improved, often many embryos were transferred at once in the hope that at least one would implant and develop into a pregnancy. That increased the risk of triplets, quadruplets or more in some cases.
“Most people in that situation will either deliver prematurely, or those fetuses don’t survive because the uterus is not meant to hold multiple babies,” said Dr. Emily Jungheim. “Higher-order multiples are always going to lead to time in the neonatal intensive care unit.”
Multiple babies born prematurely face serious risks like blindness, damage to the bowels and other long-term disabilities.
Doctors say freezing embryos also gives a woman’s body time to recover before an embryo is implanted. IVF cycles involve taking medications and hormones to stimulate egg production, which takes a toll on the body. “When going through an IVF cycle, the lining of the uterus sees higher levels of estrogen, which creates a nontypical environment,” Williams said. “If you put the embryos back in that environment, there’s a higher risk of complications. It’s better not to transfer right away. It’s better for there to be a new, healthier lining.”
Young female cancer patients can lose their fertility because of chemotherapy. Having the option to freeze embryos can be the only bright spot during one of the toughest times of their life. “If a woman has cancer and has to go through treatment, that can obliterate her eggs,” Williams said. “If she undergoes IVF and freezes embryos, once she recovers, she has embryos stored to help her build a family.”
“Genetic justice: Polygenic scores and ethnic differences” (Genetic Literacy Project/Parrhesia)
Dr. Jonathan Anomaly argues that taboos into research on genetic group differences may harm disadvantaged gruops.
For many traits, polygenic scores only work well for the population on which they are trained. Because racial and ethnic groups differ genetically, the same models cannot be used to forecast the traits of Africans and Asians equally well.
Genetic information from one group, such as white British in the UK Biobank, can be used to predict the traits of people from genetically similar groups — such as Swedes or Poles — without much loss in accuracy. Similarly, polygenic scores developed for Koreans predict traits in Chinese and Japanese people quite well.
In general, the power of polygenic scores weakens in proportion to how genetically distant one group is from another group. Genetic differences have arise since the populations diverged tens of thousands of years ago.
Polygenic scores will soon allow parents to select embryos for traits that will give their children genetic advantages, including higher intelligence and better health.
Steve Hsu, a co-founder of Genomic Prediction, has said that initially intelligence screening will only be used to detect a mental disability, but he has little doubt it will eventually be used to identify the potential IQ among embryos. “I think people are going to demand that. If we don’t do it, some other company will,” said Hsu.
Anomaly argues that social-justice taboos in modern genetics research may end up depriving some ethnic groups of the opportunities that others will have. Such taboos shut down research into genetic differences in socially significant traits, including intelligence.
Currently, there is no African or South Asian equivalent of the large biobanks that exist in places like the UK and Japan.
Scientists have demonstrated the high heritability of intelligence and other psychological traits, their research is often spurned in Western countries by political activists who do not want to believe that genes – rather than environmental or social factors such as poverty or oppression – can help explain observable inequalities in wealth, education, and other social outcomes.
In the years after World War II, anthropologists and the United Nations drove a new consensus view that race does not biologically exist. This view was sharply criticized by influential scientists at the time.
Prominent evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky dismissed the UN position on race as a “noble lie.”
British geneticist and polymath Sir Ronald Fisher agreed, concluding that “the practical international problem is that of learning to share the resources of this planet amicably with persons of materially different nature, [but] this problem is being obscured by entirely well-intentioned efforts to minimize the real differences that exist.”
James Lee, a world-renowned behavior geneticist, recently wrote about his experience of being blocked by the National Institute of Health (NIH) when applying to use a government database to learn more about the genetic foundations of intelligence. According to Lee, the NIH feared that such research might lead to groups being “stigmatized” or “marginalized,” apparently recognizing that group differences are likely to be found as a byproduct of this research.
Major scientific journals, such as Nature and Science, have adopted similar standards.
Anomaly argues such taboos will hurt the people they are supposed to help. As polygenic scores will become increasingly powerful in the next years, the question is which groups will be able to use these scores to improve the prospects of their children. Unless data is collected on all groups — including data on traits like intelligence — many people will be unable to use polygenic scores to guide their reproductive decisions.
He concludes that social justice advocates who want to help the least well-off groups should stop stigmatizing scientific research and start advocating for the collection of genetic data from which all groups can benefit.
Jonathan Anomaly is the academic director of the Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics in Quito, Ecuador, and the author of Creating Future People: The Science and Ethics of Genetic Enhancement (Routledge, 2024).
Population Policies & Trends
Spanish pronatalist association launches “save the planet, have more children” campaign (CNA)
Madrid’s Large Families Association of Madrid in Spain has launched an advertising campaign featuring the message “Save the planet, have more children.”
The campaign’s objective is to “turn on its head the prevailing pessimism and invite more people to experience the joy that comes with a large family.”
The ads were featured on billboards throughout metropolitan Madrid.
The ads include a QR code that invites readers to watch and share a video that exposes the programs of international institutions pressuring governments to pursue policies to reduce fertility.
The Large Families Association’s ad campaign is reminiscent of a similar one that ran in New York’s Times Square in January by EveryLife, the leading pro-life diaper company in the U.S. This featured a post by X owner Elon Musk that read: “Having children is saving the world.”
New Zealand fertility rate witnesses historic low since WWII (Stats NZ)
There were 19,071 more births than deaths in 2023, according to data released by Stats NZ.
This is the lowest annual natural increase since 1943, when there were 17,562 more births than deaths.
Between 2022 and 2023, there was a 3% decrease in the number of births, while there was a 3% increase in the number of women aged 15–49 years. 2023 had the lowest absolute number of births in New Zealand in 20 years.
The New-Zealand fertility rate hit a record low of 1.56 births per woman in 2023.
The total fertility rate has been below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman since 2013.
Population insights analyst Rebekah Hennessey said: “The latest decline reflects a continued trend of smaller average family sizes and increased rates of childlessness, although the total fertility rate is also affected by changes in the age of giving birth.”
Declines in fertility rates in New Zealand and internationally reflect a range of factors, including changes in female participation in education and work, changes in costs of living and raising children, and changes in access to contraception.
More on population policies and trends:
“Baby makes three: The effort to raise birth rates will fall flat unless the number of marriages increases” (World)
Genetic Studies
“Heritability of cognitive and emotion processing during functional MRI in a twin sample” (Human Brain Mapping)
Despite compelling evidence that brain structure is heritable, the evidence for the heritability of task-evoked brain function is less robust.
Findings from previous studies are inconsistent possibly reflecting small samples and methodological variations.
In a large national twin sample, this study systematically evaluated heritability of task-evoked brain activity, derived from functional magnetic resonance imaging, in brain regions involved in cognitive and emotional functions.
Using different methods, heritability estimated between 23% and 34% for different tasks.
The authors conclude that the results suggest a complex relationship between genetic factors and environmental interactions gives rise to neural activation underlying cognition and emotion.
“Intergenerational transmission of ADHD behaviors: genetic and environmental pathways” (Psychological Medicine)
The study investigates whether covariation between parental and child attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) behaviors can be explained by environmental and/or genetic transmission.
The study used a large children-of-twins-and-siblings sample (N = 22 276 parents and 11 566 8-year-old children) of the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study. This enabled disentangling intergenerational influences via parental genes and parental behaviors (i.e. genetic and environmental transmission, respectively).
Child ADHD behaviors correlated with their mother’s (0.24) and father’s (0.10) ADHD behaviors. These correlations were largely due to additive genetic transmission. Total heritability was found to be 57%.
There were small effects of parental ADHD behaviors (2% environmental transmission) and gene–environment correlation (3%). The remaining variability in ADHD behaviors was due to individual-specific environmental factors (the so-called non-shared environment).
The authors conclude that intergenerational resemblance of ADHD behaviors is primarily due to genetic transmission, with little evidence for parental ADHD behaviors causing children’s ADHD behaviors. This contradicts theories proposing environmental explanations of intergenerational transmission of ADHD, such as parenting theories or psychological life-history theory.
“Unravelling the genetic and environmental influences on trust” (EurkAlert!)
Trust, a cornerstone of human interaction, has a significant genetic component, with around 33% of the variation between individuals attributed to our genes.
The Australian study used data from twins and a meta-analysis of previous studies on the heritability of trust.
Successful relationships, economic transactions and social cohesion are all a matter of trust.
“Higher levels of trust are associated with a range of social and economic benefits, so understanding the factors that influence our tendency to trust others could be used to improve community wellbeing,” said lead author. Dr. Nathan Kettlewell of the University of Technology Sydney.
“Twin studies are a powerful tool for disentangling genetic and environmental influences on complex traits, as they allow us to compare similarities in trust levels between identical twins, who share 100% of their genes, and fraternal twins, who share on average 50% of their genes,” said Dr Kettlewell.
“Trust is a trait that is difficult to define and measure, and it can also change across different domains. For example, someone might show high levels of trust in social relationships but low levels of trust in politics,” said Professor Agnieszka Tymula. “Our results don’t imply that people with certain genes are doomed to be high or low in trust. However, when we reflect on our own behaviour, and that of people we know, it’s important to recognise that heritability is a component.”
Professor Tymula argues that: “This can affect how we see ourselves, and how we treat others. For example, recognising a person’s distrust in politicians is partly due to the lottery of genes, we might come to appreciate why someone who grows up in similar circumstances can have such different beliefs.”
While the findings highlight the significant role of genetics in trust, environmental factors such as upbringing, cultural norms, and life experiences interact with genetic predispositions to influence an individual’s trust.
The study was published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.
More genetic studies:
“Multiple sclerosis: familial risk and heritability”: this Swedish study found a heritability of 55% for relapsing onset multiple sclerosis (MedPage Today)
Women are more prone to autoimmune diseases: study suggests the answer may found in their extra X chromosome (LabRoots)
Further Learning
Podcast: Razib Khan on Quillette Cetera episode 30 (Quillette)
Geneticist Razib Khan answers controversial questions on the Quillette Cetera podcast, such as: Are Ashkenazi Jews indigenous to the Middle East? Is Palestinian a distinct ethnicity, different to other Arabs? Are some ethnicities more homogenous than others? Is inbreeding actually terrible for your genetics or can it make them stronger? If we needed to send a rocket to space to preserve the human species, who would Khan put on it?
More on evolution and biotech:
Patrick Whittle, “On biology and politics” (Quillette)
“Have we created a society that’s too complex to survive?” (Big Think)
“Female Trump supporters exhibit slightly elevated subclinical psychopathy, study finds” (PsyPost)
“Did the ancient Greeks and Romans experience Alzheimer’s?” (USC)
“Revisiting the science of attraction: Averageness is key to facial beauty, study finds” (PsyPost)
“Men’s physical attractiveness shapes venture capital investment, study finds” (PsyPost)
“‘Deleting Darwinism’: Influential Indian nationalist calls for rejection of evolution, turns towards Hindu creationism” (Genetic Literacy Project)
Disclaimer: The Genetic Choice Project cannot fact-check the linked-to stories and studies, nor do the views expressed necessarily reflect our own.