If you’ve had qualms about Herasight’s marketing, Sasha Gusev’s (@sashagusevposts.bsky.social) Substack post will give you even more.

Yes, these are good statements but they mostly leave the broader implications for other people to sort out. A point that I think has been under-appreciated is that these companies have a direct commercial incentive to create stigma around not using the technology, and they are aggressively doing so.

Important piece thinking through what eugenics actually is and how this qualifies. It's not lost on me that these companies are primarily men telling women how to responsibly reproduce. The marketing/examples are telling. It's part of a larger movement around control & should be treated seriously.

To be fair, there have been a couple of articles published from professional organisations pushing back against PGT-P and embryo selection: ACMG pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38393332/ ASRM pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41309413/ But I'd agree this is nowhere near enough.

This is an excellent piece: embryo selection isn’t necessarily eugenics but the founder of Herasight is openly advocating for eugenics, largely without pushback from academics or academic societies

Like, “Defending eugenics” is an absolutely bonkers title for a paper and the author list is a mix of “people you’d totally expect to write this article” and “people who should know better”. Either way an actual scholar of eugenics took them to school philarchive.org/archive/WILE...

As usual the science is questionable, but Anomaly is a particularly nasty and intellectually/ethically problematic person at the helm

I wrote about the bizarre case of Herasight, the embryo selection company going all in on eugenics.

I rounded up some of the missing heritability discussions from the past few weeks and got the last word in (for now).

I wrote about missing heritability, "missing environmentality," and why I still think twin studies are interesting and valuable: kathrynpaigeharden.substack.com/p/twins-are-...

Excited to share work from my postdoc with @docedge.bsky.social and collaborators Matt Pennell and @jgschraiber.bsky.social, newly out over the weekend: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/6)

Massive single-cell study by Kanai et al (www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...): - Once statistical power is high, constrained genes have more (though weaker) eQTLs. - Chromatin-QTLs near constrained genes have "normal" effect sizes, colocalize more with disease, but exhibit attenuated peak-gene effects.

Good context here on the heritability discussion that steps back from dispassionate itemizing

Excited to share a preprint of my PhD project looking at interactions between SNPs and polygenic scores in the UK Biobank! A thread... 🧵 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

When non-genetic, correlative analyses are shown to be genetically confounded, the lesson is that we shouldn't use them to draw any causal conclusions. When genetic analyses are shown to be environmentally confounded the lesson is, uh, look, they just estimate different parameters okay!

Some history of science grad student is going to have one hell of a dissertation about how Arthur Jensen wrecked two disciplines for half a century.

I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵

Nice! Whole-genome heritability estimates in the UK Biobank. Average WGS-h2 was 26%, with 21% common and 5% rare. Broadly aligns with recent sib-reg and RDR estimates.

Excited to share this preprint from first author Jon Rosen, a postdoctoral fellow in the @klmohlke.bsky.social lab and my lab. We examine eQTL study sample size and how this affects signal discovery and rates of colocalization with GWAS. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Very happy to be back in Boston for #ASHG25🧬 this time as a PI! Very proud of my stellar PhD student Jiawei who’s giving a platform talk on her work quantifying influences of genetic ancestry and the environment on tumor somatic alterations and survival. 🗓️ Wed Oct 15 11:15AM

In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.

Massive sibling regression study finds that human traits are largely environmentally driven (average heritability = 0.3)

Interesting evidence for genetics explaining disparities in T2D. Previous work identified a Neanderthal introgressed haplotype common to Native American ancestry with a large effect on T2D (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...). Wonder if there's power to look at archaic admixture here.

Brilliant paper by Visscher et al. Populations differ in traits/disease burden. Are these differences due to genetics? Comparing single variants or polygenic scores between populations is biased due to environmental confounders correlated with the variants. 1/3 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Delighted to see this paper with @anaignatieva.bsky.social now published in Genetics! academic.oup.com/genetics/adv... We tackle a thorny issue arising in statistical tests for genetic interactions (epistasis) using ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs)... 🧵

Excited to share our latest manuscript, "Exposure accumulation drives age-dependent disease architectures and polygenic risk scores," led by Xilin Jiang: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... I am attempting an explainer thread for the first time here: (I am usually too exhausted to post one)

I wrote about a rare genetic variant (a CNV) that appears to reduce the risk of schizophrenia diagnosis by ~5x, and why that's not as unambigously amazing as it sounds, but potentially still a pretty big deal.

Great mini thread here on lessons for GxG and GxE from non-human organisms:

Nice blog and good to see this also from the twins/shared environment side. We (with my colleagues in @wittbrodtlab.bsky.social) have tried to tackle the non-additive in experimental settings (in medaka fish) which we can map to human (as the medaka fish are "wild") www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🧵 on cool choices of image headers (and titles) all from @sashagusevposts.bsky.social's Substack 🔗 at the end 'Beneath the surface of the sum' Genetic interactions may look like the thing they deviate from Interaction (1964) by Julian Stanczak

I wrote about gene-gene interactions (epistasis) and the implications for heritability, trait definitions, natural selection, and therapeutic interventions. Biology is clearly full of causal interactions, so why don't we see them in the data? A 🧵:

The twin/family studies were not clear whether it was dominance vs. epistasis vs. some other sort of nonadditivity. Dominance was just the easiest to model. We can now estimate dominance SNP h2 but can’t obtain an estimate of epistatic SNP h2. Assimilation/contrast effects may also be at play.

While I am not entirely convinced this is “real” and not some psychometric equivalent of a vowel shift (and PRS could help find out a bit I think) this it is relevant:

One of the largest twin studies of personality anticipated massive non-additive dominance/epistasis components. These have not materialized with modern data for *any trait*, no one knows why, and the entire set of findings has apparently been memory-holed.

Decrease in phenotype by intervening on additive or epistatic mechanisms in the presence of low (left) or high (right) epistasis. Red lines indicate an increase in the phenotype when a decrease was intended.

Popgen, day7: single-locus selection models. Allele frequency change is faster at intermediate frequencies! Fixation takes longer in larger pops! And a bit more from yesterday on MK (asymptotic MK test is cool!)

Any discussion of embryo selection should probably start with the description of IVF in this piece, to at least be connected to some aspect of tangiable reality.

The use of dichotomized labels for traits that are actually continuous has bothered me ever since I started working on complex trait genetics. Sasha's blog post provides an excellent explanation of why this matters in the context of polygenic risk and embryo selection.

Great thread! We make this point in the NEJM paper, but I think it flew under the radar for many.

I wrote about how genetic risk works in the context of embryo selection and how people often think about it all wrong. A short 🧵:

An old article on "PolygenX" marketing IQ embryo selection and its links to the far-right. The newly launched company HeraSight seems to share a pretty similar business model to PolygenX and an overlapping set of employees. investigations.hopenothate.org.uk/superbaby-fa...

Arun Durvasula, PhD, of @uscpphs.bsky.social writes, "Lifestyle factors play a large role in determining who gets a disease and who doesn’t. But they are far from the entire story." A fascinating read about the relationship between genetics and our environment. ⬇️ 🔗 #Science #MedSky #ResearchSky

The proportion of epistatic heritability that is estimated as additive by quantitative genetic models. Epistasis deviates more from additivity for lower frequency causal alleles, but on average >80% of biological GxG will just look like statistical G.

A few thoughts on Herasight, the new embryo selection company. First, their whitepaper (drive.google.com/file/d/1EpFi...) implies that competitors like Nucleus have been marketing and selling grossly erroneous risk estimates. This is shocking if true! 🧵

It is depressing, but all too predictable, how swiftly we’ve gone from the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium offering reassurances about the uses of behavioural polygenic scores to one of their lead authors marketing embryo selection for IQ

Leena Peltonen School of Human Genetics in full-swing! @gosiatrynka.bsky.social @dgmacarthur.bsky.social @bpasaniuc.bsky.social @tuuliel.bsky.social @hilarycmartin.bsky.social @sashagusevposts.bsky.social @zkutalik.bsky.social @mashaals.bsky.social @alemedinarivera.bsky.social

Good take on Columbia: "Higher ed policy in the United States is now being developed through ad hoc deals, a mode of regulation that is not only inimical to the ideal of the university as a site of critical thinking but also corrosive to the democratic order and to law itself."

Very happy to share our new paper now on @medrxivpreprint: “Genetic risk effects on psychiatric disorders act in sets”, a great effort led my PhD student @jolienrietkerk.bsky.social, and performed together with collaborators Andy Dahl, Jonathan Flint, Andrew Schork etc. Thread 1/n