>Such predictions, at first hit-or-miss, are becoming more accurate. One test described last year can guess a person’s height to within four centimeters, on the basis of 20,000 distinct DNA letters in a genome.
I find that comparison highly misleading, height was always a reasonably 'simple' trait with very high heritability that is (in our society) relatively uninfluenced by environment. Here's a 2009 paper showing that you can predict height reasonably by averaging the parents' height (the 'Victorian method'). https://www.nature.com/articles/ejhg20095
It's one of the few traits where you can do that well, so why would you use that as an example as to why genetics-based tests are getting better? All other phenotypes/traits are much more complex.
>When they built a predictor for coronary heart disease, for instance, Kathiresan’s team discovered that the people it predicted to have the very highest risk, the top 2.5 percent, had four times the average chance of developing clogged arteries.
So what's the base risk? If the base risk is 0.0005% then a four times higher chance is still tiny.
I think it's this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.3914
As the scientists correctly pointed out, they only looked at Europeans, so who knows how this fares with Asians or Africans (likely: not well). None of the odds ratios are above 1.1, most are around 1.05, not a very extreme change to me!
Why this matters: In countries like Australia, unlike Germany, there is no protection by the law from insurance companies who don't understand genetics. People can and have lost life insurances due to the results and questionable interpretations of genetic tests. I can only hope politicians don't read this article.
There's nothing misleading about it, nor does height have a uniquely high heritability You can also predict childrens' adult IQ and many many other traits to similar degrees based on mid-parent regression, because they are all genetically influenced.
The point of the height GWAS example is that because it is so very obviously, even to the naked eye of the layman, genetically influenced and objective (you can't argue height doesn't exist), it serves as a simple test. If GWASes can't predict height, they probably can't predict anything else. And this was exactly how height was used back in 2009 or so when the 'missing heritability' debate was still going: if all these traits are genetic and additive, why aren't the GWASes able to find anything for height (back then)? The answer turns out to simply be that there wasn't enough data and the linear model analyses were lousy. Now there is enough data and better algorithms are being applied, so as expected, height prediction works much much better.
> All other phenotypes/traits are much more complex.
No, not really. That sort of polygenicity is the norm. Look at, for example, Shi et al 2016 which attempts to model the distribution of effects & thus polygenicity of 30 human complex traits: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/01/14/035907 . Height doesn't exactly pop out of any of the charts.
> So what's the base risk? If the base risk is 0.0005% then a four times higher chance is still tiny.
...coronary artery disease should be quite obviously a higher base rate than 0.0005%. In any case, I believe the referenced study is Inouye et al 2018, in which case the extremized prediction is ~8% vs ~30% lifetime risk: https://www.gwern.net/images/genetics/2018-inouye-cad-riskpr...
> None of the odds ratios are above 1.1, most are around 1.05, not a very extreme change to me!
C'mon people...this is not science, this is fortune telling. They are just doing a bunch of huge multiparameter curve fits, which are going to pick up signal from all sorts of things that have nothing to do with biology no matter how big their sample size is. These people will tell you with a straight face that a bunch of markers that just happen to be associated with "Northeast European ancestry" are also predictive of "Polka dancing ability," and their papers are shuffling and repackaging thousands upon thousands of nonsensical little tidbits exactly like that. Life experience doesn't just "average out." Do better.
Do you believe statistics aren't real math? I'm not sure why the complaint. Sure it may be inaccurate, but as others said, along questions like: "do you have X heritage?" are already used as predictors for certain diseases. Genetic investigations just gets a little closer to the base truth, even if no one knows exactly which genes are doing which things.
Some GWAS studies thats definitely true, but ultimately if the only signal you're picking up from the genetics is someones ancestry (haplotype) and that is enough to confer accurate predictions then Im not sure what your problem is? Thats great, plenty of people in the US for example have no understanding about what their genetics might confer because they might not even know where their genetic heritage comes from.
So if I have a higher risk of heart disease than average, the advice will be to eat well and exercise. This is indistinguishable from the current guidelines without any genetic information.
No rational human being should consent to their genetic information being correlated with their IQ. This kind of data is a surefire way to convince otherwise entirely capable people that they should give up on life. It's abhorrent that anyone could conceive of trying to make money out of such a test.
Adhering to that basic advice is hard. Most people don’t do it. I’d like to see a study if adherence to diet and exercise improves with genetic predictions.
For me, it would help to have a somewhat accurate prediction tied to my Fitbit that shows me right now the benefit of my hour cardio every day. My doctor could look at my physical activity vital signs pulled from wearables during my physical and give me personalized advice “You’re going to die 6 years earlier because of your genes+your diet+your excercise with 20% margin.” Is a lot more effective than “your diet and excercise suck, it will have some unquantified negative impact. But you might be fine, who knows.”
Your reality is better than the test predicted? You beat the genetic lottery! Go show to those correlations and the whole world what you really have in you.
Your reality is worse than the test predicted? You are not making full use of your genetic potential! Work harder on yourself and you could improve tremendously. If only you had known sooner that you were born for greatness.
Sure, that's no different than astrology, but lots of people are quite happy about taking advice from astrology. Genetic testing would have the additional advantage of having at least some relation to reality.
I love stuff like this. What we need now is a service that can estimate potential genetic outcomes when having children with a partner. This can finally open the door to making genetic information a standard in dating profiles.
Instead of choosing partners based on short term metrics and hoping for the best, people would be able to select with more confidence that their children with someone would come out the way they like.
To me this kind of tech is a great way to leave a dent in our universe. A world filled with smarter, stronger, and calmer children is a world that is eventually filled with smarter, stronger, and calmer adults, who then go on to have even better offspring and accelerate the evolution of mankind into a more civilized species. Perhaps then we can finally see the end of war and ridiculous squabbles over matter.
I personally may take a stab at creating a dating service like this if the pieces are all there someday, but I’d hope by then someone else will have beaten me to it.
people would be able to select with more confidence that their children with someone would come out the way they like.
In other words, a eugenics profile.
Why stop at dating apps? You could put the data mortgage applications, insurance profiles, and more. I can imagine some of the conversations wouldn't be too far off this:
"I love you, but with a 22% chance of our kids having brown eyes and a 56% chance of high cholesterol, I have to end the relationship."
"The bank denied the application, because you're at a higher risk for a myocardial infarction by the age of 50."
"My car insurance rates will go through the roof if I put you on my policy because you're genetically predisposed to drive more aggressively than me."
It’s a sci-fi trope of a kind of human bred or engineered for ultimate survival: tall, strong, smart, brave, chiseled abs and cheekbones.
But real survival characteristics are small, hairy, lazy, put on fat easily, avoid danger wherever possible, etc. So what are you actually optimising for?
My guess is that only a few years after this tech, we'll have better tech that can give your child the desired genes no matter who your partner is. And then we'll have a new age of reproductive competition the likes of which the Earth has never seen. Not a utopia, that's for damn sure.
You're going to leave a lot of people behind with this. Which is good or bad depending on your worldview. Purging people with bad genes by profiling them could be deemed unethical though and that's exactly what will happen once you're forced to show your gene quality to everyone that's interested. It can happen indirectly through dating or directly through genocide.
I’m just not comfortable with this. Maybe I’m just getting old and maybe I have seen too many movies but I feel uneasy about our children and maybe us having another “grade” put on them.
I’d like to think this would be good so maybe some one will comment how this won’t eventually go too far.
If altering starts happening which I would imagine it will at one point will be no longer human (and maybe that is a good thing).
Maybe at some point like in the Altered Carbon series it won’t even matter and it will just go back to money (or maybe it will always be the case as the ultimate grade).
But these studies are merely going to give you a correlation. It will always be very hard to prove direct causality without experimentation, which on humans is not really feasible or without a full understanding of how the brain works, which we are still very far from.
The other thing is that the way I like to think of our brain is like a muscle. Our DNA drives much of the range in which we can develop our muscles, people born with a certain body type will never be an athlete, but even if you are born with good muscular capacity, a KFC-eating couch potato will never get to the olympics. What one does with this capacity matters a lot. Only science will tell but I like to think that the brains works in a similar way. Some kids will never be geniuses but there is still a wide range in which they can evolve so there is no reason to corner them in a box.
One general rule of life I've learned: it's never better to live in ignorance. If you have a chance to learn a fact and the idea of knowing it fills you with dread, you should regard the hesitation as a strong signal that you should go ahead with learning it anyway. Even if it's initially painful, the knowledge will be ultimately useful.
Scientific facts about ourselves, both general and specific, are among the most painful. We go through lives deluding ourselves. That's why modern scientific introspection is so important and why it'll ultimately lead to a better world.
Long before we'll have the technology to alter genes reliably we will be able to select embryos before implantation. This is possible even today. Better genetic testing and improvements in fertility medicine only makes it cheaper and more effective.
Here's my wild prediction for the 21st century: before 2050, China will replace its one child policy with a "you have to be at least this tall to ride" policy - only people with a genetic "score" of X or higher are allowed to reproduce. Every couple of years, X is bumped up, and the next generation is a bit smarter, prettier, and stronger than the previous one.
Great techno adventure book on this subject by http://daniel-suarez.com/ "Change Agent"
This guy has more insightful ideas in his first 20 pages than most authors have their whole lives.
I can predict things like height, too. And I don't need your DNA. You're 5'9". I'm right, within 4 inches, because 80% of everybody is within 4" of 5'9".
Using DNA to predict the likelihood of a behavior or IQ is on a collision course with the ghost in the machine doctrine, which assumes our intelligence, character, what we become is solely or predominantly the result of our environment/culture/education. I wonder how far research in that field can go before it is decided that the potential outcome would be politically unacceptable.
Modern-day lysenkoism disappoints me. The blank slate model is thoroughly discredited, and people as eminent as Pinker have written extensively about it. While you can still find plenty of blank slate support in polite society, those espousing the idea are operating under something akin to religious faith.
[+] [-] a_bonobo|8 years ago|reply
I find that comparison highly misleading, height was always a reasonably 'simple' trait with very high heritability that is (in our society) relatively uninfluenced by environment. Here's a 2009 paper showing that you can predict height reasonably by averaging the parents' height (the 'Victorian method'). https://www.nature.com/articles/ejhg20095
It's one of the few traits where you can do that well, so why would you use that as an example as to why genetics-based tests are getting better? All other phenotypes/traits are much more complex.
>When they built a predictor for coronary heart disease, for instance, Kathiresan’s team discovered that the people it predicted to have the very highest risk, the top 2.5 percent, had four times the average chance of developing clogged arteries.
So what's the base risk? If the base risk is 0.0005% then a four times higher chance is still tiny.
I think it's this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.3914 As the scientists correctly pointed out, they only looked at Europeans, so who knows how this fares with Asians or Africans (likely: not well). None of the odds ratios are above 1.1, most are around 1.05, not a very extreme change to me!
Why this matters: In countries like Australia, unlike Germany, there is no protection by the law from insurance companies who don't understand genetics. People can and have lost life insurances due to the results and questionable interpretations of genetic tests. I can only hope politicians don't read this article.
[+] [-] gwern|8 years ago|reply
The point of the height GWAS example is that because it is so very obviously, even to the naked eye of the layman, genetically influenced and objective (you can't argue height doesn't exist), it serves as a simple test. If GWASes can't predict height, they probably can't predict anything else. And this was exactly how height was used back in 2009 or so when the 'missing heritability' debate was still going: if all these traits are genetic and additive, why aren't the GWASes able to find anything for height (back then)? The answer turns out to simply be that there wasn't enough data and the linear model analyses were lousy. Now there is enough data and better algorithms are being applied, so as expected, height prediction works much much better.
> All other phenotypes/traits are much more complex.
No, not really. That sort of polygenicity is the norm. Look at, for example, Shi et al 2016 which attempts to model the distribution of effects & thus polygenicity of 30 human complex traits: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/01/14/035907 . Height doesn't exactly pop out of any of the charts.
> So what's the base risk? If the base risk is 0.0005% then a four times higher chance is still tiny.
...coronary artery disease should be quite obviously a higher base rate than 0.0005%. In any case, I believe the referenced study is Inouye et al 2018, in which case the extremized prediction is ~8% vs ~30% lifetime risk: https://www.gwern.net/images/genetics/2018-inouye-cad-riskpr...
> None of the odds ratios are above 1.1, most are around 1.05, not a very extreme change to me!
It's the total that matters.
[+] [-] tinokid|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggggtez|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ultimatt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] laretluval|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gatsky|8 years ago|reply
No rational human being should consent to their genetic information being correlated with their IQ. This kind of data is a surefire way to convince otherwise entirely capable people that they should give up on life. It's abhorrent that anyone could conceive of trying to make money out of such a test.
[+] [-] prepend|8 years ago|reply
For me, it would help to have a somewhat accurate prediction tied to my Fitbit that shows me right now the benefit of my hour cardio every day. My doctor could look at my physical activity vital signs pulled from wearables during my physical and give me personalized advice “You’re going to die 6 years earlier because of your genes+your diet+your excercise with 20% margin.” Is a lot more effective than “your diet and excercise suck, it will have some unquantified negative impact. But you might be fine, who knows.”
[+] [-] yorwba|8 years ago|reply
Your reality is better than the test predicted? You beat the genetic lottery! Go show to those correlations and the whole world what you really have in you.
Your reality is worse than the test predicted? You are not making full use of your genetic potential! Work harder on yourself and you could improve tremendously. If only you had known sooner that you were born for greatness.
Sure, that's no different than astrology, but lots of people are quite happy about taking advice from astrology. Genetic testing would have the additional advantage of having at least some relation to reality.
[+] [-] hycaria|8 years ago|reply
Life is not binary. I will never be a pro athlete yet I can enjoy doing sports.
[+] [-] matte_black|8 years ago|reply
Instead of choosing partners based on short term metrics and hoping for the best, people would be able to select with more confidence that their children with someone would come out the way they like.
To me this kind of tech is a great way to leave a dent in our universe. A world filled with smarter, stronger, and calmer children is a world that is eventually filled with smarter, stronger, and calmer adults, who then go on to have even better offspring and accelerate the evolution of mankind into a more civilized species. Perhaps then we can finally see the end of war and ridiculous squabbles over matter.
I personally may take a stab at creating a dating service like this if the pieces are all there someday, but I’d hope by then someone else will have beaten me to it.
[+] [-] ilamont|8 years ago|reply
In other words, a eugenics profile.
Why stop at dating apps? You could put the data mortgage applications, insurance profiles, and more. I can imagine some of the conversations wouldn't be too far off this:
"I love you, but with a 22% chance of our kids having brown eyes and a 56% chance of high cholesterol, I have to end the relationship."
"The bank denied the application, because you're at a higher risk for a myocardial infarction by the age of 50."
"My car insurance rates will go through the roof if I put you on my policy because you're genetically predisposed to drive more aggressively than me."
[+] [-] gaius|8 years ago|reply
But real survival characteristics are small, hairy, lazy, put on fat easily, avoid danger wherever possible, etc. So what are you actually optimising for?
[+] [-] cousin_it|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] announcerman|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arethuza|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soVeryTired|8 years ago|reply
Maybe we can build a site like that, but you've ignored the question of whether we should build it.
[+] [-] defgeneric|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saiya-jin|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] agentgt|8 years ago|reply
I’d like to think this would be good so maybe some one will comment how this won’t eventually go too far.
If altering starts happening which I would imagine it will at one point will be no longer human (and maybe that is a good thing).
Maybe at some point like in the Altered Carbon series it won’t even matter and it will just go back to money (or maybe it will always be the case as the ultimate grade).
[+] [-] cm2187|8 years ago|reply
The other thing is that the way I like to think of our brain is like a muscle. Our DNA drives much of the range in which we can develop our muscles, people born with a certain body type will never be an athlete, but even if you are born with good muscular capacity, a KFC-eating couch potato will never get to the olympics. What one does with this capacity matters a lot. Only science will tell but I like to think that the brains works in a similar way. Some kids will never be geniuses but there is still a wide range in which they can evolve so there is no reason to corner them in a box.
[+] [-] quotemstr|8 years ago|reply
Scientific facts about ourselves, both general and specific, are among the most painful. We go through lives deluding ourselves. That's why modern scientific introspection is so important and why it'll ultimately lead to a better world.
[+] [-] adrianN|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beckler|8 years ago|reply
Despite it being fiction, it goes pretty deep into eugenics and genetic discriminationin a modern society.
[+] [-] nukeop|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cybertronic|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philipps|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beckler|8 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
[+] [-] BatFastard|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaius|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tanilama|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wiz21c|8 years ago|reply
Answering my own question : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygenic_score
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2187|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quotemstr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prepend|8 years ago|reply
Do you want to know what impact genes have (lots and lots with current knowledge)? Or pretend it doesn’t?
Knowing will let us take steps as society to equalize fairly (improve below mean hopefully).
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]