Repronews #33: “Human clickbait” promoting big families & genetic enhancement

Gattaca Genomics study; Flemish nationalists' measures to boost birth rates; mapping of genetic regulation of brain development; human brains shrinking

Malcolm and Simone Collins and their children. Source: Bryan Anselm/The Guardian

Welcome to the latest issue of Repronews! Highlights from this week’s edition:

• Repro/genetics

  • Gattaca Genomics to launch study on aneuploidy and embryo development to improve embryo selection during IVF.

• Population Policies & Trends

  • The Guardian profiles Malcolm and Simone Collins, an American couple promoting big families and practicing genetic enhancement via reprotech.

  • Flemish nationalists propose doubling child benefits for women under 30, slammed by Greens as real-life “Handmaid’s Tale.”

• Genetic Studies

  • Major U.S. study maps genes regulating brain activity and development, including conditions such as schizophrenia, PTSD, and depression.

• Further Learning

  • Why has the human brain shrunk over the last 100,000 years?

Repro/genetics

Reprotech company launches major study on embryo selection in IVF (Gattaca Genomics)

• Gattaca Genomics has received approval for a study to combine timelapse imaging and genetic testing to examine the relationship between embryo development and aneuploidy (an abnormal number of chromosomes).

• Partnering with IVF clinics worldwide, the study aims to identify developmental patterns that predict healthy embryos, potentially improving IVF success rates. Gattaca Genomics aims to collect a large and diverse dataset

• “Aneuploidy is a major obstacle for many couples pursuing IVF, and we believe this study has the potential to unlock new insights into how we can better identify and select embryos with the greatest chance of resulting in a healthy pregnancy," said Dr. Eva Schenkman, Director of Embryology Services at Gattaca Genomics.

• Aneuploidy can lead to various genetic disorders, including Down syndrome (trisomy 21), and increase the chance of miscarriage. Identifying and selecting embryos without aneuploidy is crucial in improving IVF success rates.

• Gattaca Genomics’ expertise is in Preimplantation Genetic Testing (PGT) and Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS), which aim to give prospective parents crucial insights to inform meaningful decisions. The company aims to enhance the chances of healthy pregnancy, minimize genetic risks, and provide prospective parents insights to inform meaningful decisions.

More on repro/genetics:

• “Ten families and counting: Time for global limits on donor-created (half-) siblings?” (PET)

• “Perspectives of preimplantation genetic testing patients in Belgium on the ethics of polygenic embryo screening” (Reproductive BioMedicine Online)

Population Policies & Trends

America’s premier pronatalists on having ‘tons of kids’ to save the world” (Guardian)

• The Guardian has released a profile of American pronatalists Simone and Malcolm Collins. The 36/37-year-old couple are expecting a fourth child and plan to have a minimum of seven.

• The couple runs the Pragmatist Foundation, a pronatalist charity.

• The Collinses are atheists who believe in science and data. Their pronatalism is born from the hyper-rational effective altruism movement, which uses utilitarian principles and cool-headed logic to determine what is best for life on Earth.

• The world’s most famous pronatalist is father-of-11 Elon Musk.

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has invested in several reproductive technology startups, one aiming to engineer human eggs out of stem cells, another screening embryos for health outcomes.

• The Skype co-founder and Estonian billionaire Jaan Tallinn (father of five) has donated just under half a million dollars to the Collins’ pronatalist foundation.

• Birthrates are plummeting across the worldwide.In England and Wales the birthrate is currently 1.49, in the U.S. it is 1.6, in China it’s 1.2. Politicians in South Korea have referred to their birthrate as a national emergency: at 0.72 (with 0.55 in the capital, Seoul) it is the lowest in the world.

• According to a paper published in the Lancet, 97% of countries will have birth rates below what is necessary to sustain the population by the end of the century.

• This is creating a pension timebomb, with not enough young people to support an aging population.

• “The average Catholic majority country in Europe has a 1.3 fertility rate,” said Malcolm. “You see this in some Latin American countries. That’s basically halving the population every generation. For anyone who’s familiar with compounding numbers, that’s huge.”

• Malcolm sees South Korea as a vision of our near future: the problem is most acute in countries that are “technophilic, pluralistic, educated, where women have rights.”

• The only places where the birthrate is not falling to unsustainable levels are countries where the average citizen earns less than $5,000 a year. Malcolm said: “The only way countries like ours can survive is through immigration from those very poor countries where birthrates continue to be high. You’re outsourcing the labor of childrearing to a separate group. And importing people from Africa to support a mostly non-working white population—because you didn’t put in labor to support non-working white people—has really horrible optics.”

• “We don’t mind being human clickbait—that’s kind of our job—so long as we get the message out before things get too bad,” Malcolm said.

• Pronatalism is beginning to be accepted as a core conservative value. “Babies are good, and a country that has children is a healthy country,” Republican senator J. D. Vance said in a 2021 speech to a conservative thinktank.

• Donald Trump agrees. “I want a baby boom!” he declared at the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference. “You men are so lucky out there.”

• The average pronatalist is “young, nerdy, contrarian, autist,” Malcolm says, proudly. “Usually, they will be running a tech company or be in venture capital.”

• Malcolm insists pronatalism is about pluralism and not only whites: “Humanity improves through cultural evolution. For that you need cultural diversity.”

• “I don’t care if environmentalists don’t want to have kids,” he said. “The point of the movement is to help those that do.”

• “The vast majority of right-leaning people in Silicon Valley are pronatalist,” Malcolm said. “You’re probably looking at 100,000 people or something that subscribe to our specific vision.”

• Bryan Caplan, an American economist, has written Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think, a treatise against helicopter parenting that argues that upbringing matters less than genetics in childhood development.

• “Pronatalist parenting is intrinsically low-effort parenting,” Malcolm said.

• The Collinses say women’s rights will suffer unless birthrates improve. “The only cultural groups that survive will be the ones that don’t give women a choice. And that’s a terrifying world for us,” said Malcolm. “People are like, ‘You’re bringing a Handmaid’s Tale into the world!’ That’s exactly what we’re trying to prevent.”

• The Collinses have “quite a beef with anti-abortion people”, said Malcolm, because restricting abortion is actually bad for birthrates. “Romania tried this. They had a spike in fertility rates and then a quick fall.” Banning abortion gives pregnancy an image problem. “This is a very bad way to motivate high fertility.”

• Their brand of pronatalism isn’t about trapping people into having children or coercing the unwilling. “Our movement is, if you want to have more kids, or you want to have kids, let’s take away all the stuff that makes it hard.”

• Simone has a history of eating disorders that have affected her fertility: she can only get pregnant through IVF. The Collinses have had the genomes of their frozen embryos tested and are selecting which ones to implant according to how well they score on intelligence and future health. They don’t just want a big family: they want an optimal one.

• Several companies can test embryos for the risks of certain conditions, including the Sam Altman-backed Genomic Prediction, which the Collinses used for health scores. For “the controversial stuff” they took Genomic Prediction’s data and gave it to another team of scientists who claim to be able to predict better likelihood of happiness or future income. (The geneticist Adam Rutherford recently said there might be “an IQ point or two” of benefit in doing this.)

• “Obviously, we looked at IQ,” says Malcolm. They discounted embryos with high risk factors for cancer and what Simone calls “mental health-related stuff where there’s just no good known treatments” including schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, depression, and anxiety. They didn’t select against autism, which they consider part of a person’s identity. “People do trait selection all the time when they prioritize certain kinds of spouses,” said Simone.

• The couple has 34 embryos left and plans to give away the ones they don’t use; three have already gone to a lesbian couple in California.

• Malcolm and Simone are engaging in “polygenics,” using technology to give parents the choice over which traits they value most. “Different cultural groups will choose different things to optimise around. Eventually, that will lead to genuine human diversity.”

• The journalist finds it hard to imagine that any parent with access to this technology wouldn’t select for intelligence or a decent future income. The Collinses tell me I couldn’t be more wrong.

• “Have you talked to parents these days?” Malcolm said. “‘I just want a child that’s happy and self-expressive.’” “‘Funny and kind,’” Simone chips in. “The most common ask is happiness and kindness.”

• The Collinses are campaigning to make this technology free for everyone to use. Screening for health outcomes is a “no brainer” in countries like the UK where healthcare is free at the point of delivery, Simone said. “You’re producing healthier people—less expensive.”

The Flemish Greens parodied Vlaams Belang’s natalist proposals by dressing up as in The Handmaid’s Tale.

“Motherhood ‘strengthens the nation’: Vlaams Belang [Flemish nationalists] under fire for natalist policies” (Brussels Times)

• The Vlaams Belang (VB), Belgium’s Flemish nationalist party, has come under fire for its program’s emphasis on “pushing” women to have children at a young age. The party has hotly denied the framing.

• The party blames existing policy for preventing families from having as many children as they might like to and proposes doubling child benefits for any woman who has children under the age of 30, as well as extending both maternity and paternity leave.

• “A healthy community welcomes children,” its manifesto states. “Choosing to have children is a positive act of self-confidence. When this is repeated, it strengthens the nation as well as the family.”

• Many of the incentives proposed by the party only apply to parents who have had EU nationality eight years before the child’s birth. One of the parents must have worked or studied for at least three years.

• “Due to practical and financial obstacles, the balance between work and family is completely lost,” said Vlaams Belang Vice President Barbara Pas. “Flemish people who want children cannot realize this desire.”

• Vlaams Belang is expected to emerge as the largest party in next month’s national elections, with over 25% of the vote in Flanders.

More on population policies and trends:

• Russia’s 2024 “year of the family” and Alexander Dugin’s dreams of a mass return to rural life (Public Orthodoxy)

Genetic Studies

Genetic control of the brain—comprehensive cell maps published (PET)

• Fifteen new studies comprehensively mapping the genes responsible for regulation of activity and development of the brain have been published.

• Neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism, and mental illnesses such as schizophrenia are common, yet underlying mechanisms are poorly understood.

• The PsychENCODE Consortium is a multi-institutional collaboration funded by the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) aiming to understand gene regulation’s impact on brain (dys)function, including neuropsychiatric diseases.

• Dr. Daniel Geschwind, ofthe University of California Los Angeles, said: “This collection of manuscripts from PsychENCODE, both individually and as a package, provides an unprecedented resource for understanding the relationship of disease risk to genetic mechanisms in the brain.”

• The studies, published across Science, Science Advances, and Scientific Reports, examined several neuropsychiatric diseases as well as the neurotypical developing human brain, and used standardized methods to create multidimensional maps of gene regulation networks.

• NIMH Director Dr. Joshua Gordon said: “These groundbreaking findings advance our understanding of where, how, and when genetic risk contributes to mental disorders such as schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder, and depression. … Moreover, the critical resources, shared freely, will help researchers pinpoint genetic variants that are likely to play a causal role in mental illnesses and identify potential molecular targets for new therapeutics.”

More on genetic studies:

• “Depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder linked with ancient viral DNA in our genome” (Gavi)

• “A polygenic score method boosted by non-additive models” (Nature Communications)

• “A systematic review with meta-analysis of heritability estimates for temperament-related traits in beef and dairy cattle populations” (Journal of Animal Breeding and Genetics)

Further Learning

Getty Images

“The mystery over why human brains have shrunk over time” (BBC)

• The brains of modern humans are around 13% smaller than those of Homo sapiens who lived 100,000 years ago. Exactly why is still puzzling researchers.

• Our big brain is thought to be what sets our species apart from other animals. Our capacity for thought and innovation allowed us to create the first art, invent the wheel, and land on the Moon.

• The human brain has nearly quadrupled in size in the six million years since our species last shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees.

• In 2023 study, Ian Tattersall, a paleoanthropologist with the American Museum of Natural History in New York, found that rapid brain expansion occurred independently in different species of hominins, and at different times across Asia, Europe, and Africa. However, the trend for brain enlargement over time was turned on its head with the arrival of modern humans.

• Theories for why the brain shrank include: that the invention of the language led to rewriting neural pathways and more efficient brain use; climate change requiring more efficient energy use ; the end of hunter-gatherer societies and pressure on diets; and self-domestication.

• “What we have done over the last 10,000 years is created tools and technologies that allow us to offload cognition onto artefacts,” says cognitive scientist Jeff Morgan Stibel from the Natural History Museum in California. “We’re able to store information in computers, and use machines to calculate things for us. So our brains might be delivering less capacity for intelligence and brainpower, but that doesn’t mean that we as a species collectively are growing less smart.”

More on human nature, evolution, and biotech:

• “Deaf baby hears for the first time after ‘groundbreaking’ gene therapy trial” (Washington Post)

• “Uruguay wants to use gene drives to eradicate devastating screwworms” (MIT Technology Review)

• “Gene edited wheat planted in test plots for the first time in Canada” (GLP)

Disclaimer: The Genetic Choice Project cannot fact-check the linked-to stories and studies, nor do the views expressed necessarily reflect our own.