[sszz]

The models are predicted off of "~20k activated SNPs" - 20,000 separate mutations, most of which have really small effects on height. "Designer babies" are pretty far off (IVF is awesome and great, but not trivial, so it would be risky to do this just to make sure a baby will be...probably somewhere near average height). Engineering the right mutations with CRISPR/Cas9-based gene editing would be astronomically expensive (and is realistically impossible); filtering embryos for the right genetic background would also be incredibly expensive and probably impossible, as you'd be relying on the natural, stochastic arrangement of those 20,000 mutations to be in sync with the vision you have for your baby.

[gwern]

Having small mutations is irrelevant; it could be dozens of large effects or thousands of small effects, it doesn't matter, you get a normal distribution anyway. The question is how much variance there is and how much of it you can predict.

Or let me put it this way: how much do siblings (ie embryos) vary in height? It's by quite a bit, often several inches. Most of this is due to genetics. And this PGS is able to predict half of the genetic contribution. So...

(If you're curious, my best estimate is that embryo selection could boost height by about an inch on average.)

> filtering embryos for the right genetic background would also be incredibly expensive and probably impossible

It would cost about $2000 for the biopsies and SNP arrays of the usual ~5 embryos, and can be done either now or in the next few years and could have been done years ago if any real effort was put into it.

[sszz]

You would only be able to select from those 5 backgrounds, however, and the predicted heights for those embryos will be drawn from a normal distribution; you can only "design" from what you've sampled.

On the other hand, if you sampled millions of embryos, you could find the rare few predicted to grow to be 6'5" person -- but this would be very expensive and basically impossible without synthetic embryos.

[gwern]

> You would only be able to select from those 5 backgrounds, however, and the predicted heights for those embryos will be drawn from a normal distribution; you can only "design" from what you've sampled.

Yes, and this is cheap and does lead to gains. (Specifically: around 1 inch.)

> but this would be very expensive and basically impossible without synthetic embryos.

First, this is not remotely what you said. Second, it's not true: you only need more eggs and they don't have to be 'synthetic' whatever that means, and there's a lot of work on inducing egg development from stem cells so in another 10 years it may well be possible for parents to do massive selection like that. Third, you don't need millions of embryos if you just want a very tall person, as the advantage is cumulative over generations (which is the critical insight behind Iterated Embryo Selection: it's much more efficient to take a few hundred embryos through multiple generations of selection than it is to try to brute force a single selective step). That's omitting any gains from CRISPR or genome synthesis or other methods not yet thought of. Fourth, why would any parent want that in the first place as that's into the realm of potential healthy problems (even if we're assuming only male embryos) and beyond the useful level of height advantages, especially when they could be instead spending that count of embryos to maximize a weighted sum of all health and other complex traits? (Remember, just because everyone talks about doing embryo selection on a single trait at a time doesn't make that remotely a good idea; there are big gains to selecting on many traits simultaneously.)

[rlanday]

Even embryo selection and genomic prediction alone gets you pretty far if you’re willing to discard a lot of embryos (is it possible to read the DNA out of sperm and egg cells non-destructively? I don’t know much about the technology involved). Just fertilize a bunch of embryos and discard all of them except the top few (selected on e.g. some weighted combination of height, intelligence, and whatever else you can predict). Then your kids will be overwhelming likely to be taller and smarter (and whatever else you selected for) than if you’d just picked embryos at random.

[gwern]

> is it possible to read the DNA out of sperm and egg cells non-destructively?

No. Who knows what the future will bring, though? There's already some neat new CRISPR-based methods for detecting DNA and viruses etc which were published the other day.