I am also not a biologist, but I apparently think I know some of this? Hopefully if I'm wrong enough, a real biologist can correct me. :)
I think we're still very far from arbitrary genetic editing and whole genome design and synthesis. I don't know how much of this is "technically feasible but way too expensive" vs "we have promising research directions on some of the challenges, but definitely don't know how to do this effectively at all", but it all adds up to that not being an option today.
The best we actually have available today is embryo selection. We don't know exactly what phenotype each embryo will express, but we've got enough statistical clues that we can make fairly good guesses most of the time. So, you make 100 embryos, sequence their DNA, then choose whichever embryo is given the best score by your statistical analysis, and use that one.
Embryo selection is far from perfect, but it lets you avoid any genetic conditions that we know how to detect, and it lets you get an embryo with more of the preferred variants of genes statistically correlated with whatever you want to select on, and it's absurdly cheaper and more efficient than alternatives like "Let each embryo grow for 30 years, then evaluate the results of the genome".
With iterated embryo selection, the idea is that instead of one large batch of 100, you do a small batch of 10, choose the best from that group, and use that as source material to make another batch of 10. This acts as a ratchet, letting you get more selection with fewer embryos.
So, the point of finding an input to a function on a computer that gets a good score is that it's the cheapest, most efficient way we know of so far to get a human embryo whose genome scores highly on this function. There are also some other nice properties, like having the embryo be highly correlated with the genomes of the parents, which a lot of people like, and is something you can explicitly add to the scoring if you want.
Just like any selection/optimization procedure, you can get some pretty bad outcomes when you go to extremes, as for a lot of traits, your function on the computer is only a statistical model of observed correlations, not a real comprehensive model of what the genome means and does. I imagine you're probably going to get something with severe issues if you tried to grow the embryo you get from 10,000 rounds of IES.
Embryo selection is trying to use what we think we know to choose the best embryo, given only the genetics. We don't have perfect knowledge, but we do have some knowledge, and we can make some bounded use of it.
I think we're still very far from arbitrary genetic editing and whole genome design and synthesis. I don't know how much of this is "technically feasible but way too expensive" vs "we have promising research directions on some of the challenges, but definitely don't know how to do this effectively at all", but it all adds up to that not being an option today.
The best we actually have available today is embryo selection. We don't know exactly what phenotype each embryo will express, but we've got enough statistical clues that we can make fairly good guesses most of the time. So, you make 100 embryos, sequence their DNA, then choose whichever embryo is given the best score by your statistical analysis, and use that one.
Embryo selection is far from perfect, but it lets you avoid any genetic conditions that we know how to detect, and it lets you get an embryo with more of the preferred variants of genes statistically correlated with whatever you want to select on, and it's absurdly cheaper and more efficient than alternatives like "Let each embryo grow for 30 years, then evaluate the results of the genome".
With iterated embryo selection, the idea is that instead of one large batch of 100, you do a small batch of 10, choose the best from that group, and use that as source material to make another batch of 10. This acts as a ratchet, letting you get more selection with fewer embryos.
So, the point of finding an input to a function on a computer that gets a good score is that it's the cheapest, most efficient way we know of so far to get a human embryo whose genome scores highly on this function. There are also some other nice properties, like having the embryo be highly correlated with the genomes of the parents, which a lot of people like, and is something you can explicitly add to the scoring if you want.
Just like any selection/optimization procedure, you can get some pretty bad outcomes when you go to extremes, as for a lot of traits, your function on the computer is only a statistical model of observed correlations, not a real comprehensive model of what the genome means and does. I imagine you're probably going to get something with severe issues if you tried to grow the embryo you get from 10,000 rounds of IES.
Embryo selection is trying to use what we think we know to choose the best embryo, given only the genetics. We don't have perfect knowledge, but we do have some knowledge, and we can make some bounded use of it.