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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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Females develop eggs after 20 weeks so you could make 1000 per generation, polygenically screen them all, pick the best and iterate.

Those eggs are immature. I'm not a developmental biologist, but would you expect in vitro maturation protocols to work on eggs forcibly harvested from a 20 week old fetus?

I'm also not confident that there's enough genetic diversity starting from one person to get a true 1 in a billion; won't there be a bunch of alleles where neither parent has what you want? I admit that this may be a nonissue if most of the alleles you want are relatively common, I don't have a good handle on the numbers here.

Put it a different way - Do any of us have a 1 in a billion chance of giving birth to Shaq? I would tentatively guess no, modulo some genetic conditions like acromegaly. Do you have evidence that this is true?

In just over a year you have 3 generations and the pick of 1 in a billion (of descendants of your starting stock)

But what then? You have one embryo. Somatic cloning? Things are getting pretty complicated my man.

Oocyte in vitro maturation (IVM) is a thing. I am not sure if anyone has used it on foetal eggs, but it is likely possible.

You aren't restricted to the original stock you can introduce new sperm each generation

To scale it up, you could potentially encourage eggs to divide (like identical twins) then sequence one, and if its the one you want, keep splitting

I think these things are not too hard to solve, you just need time and money, and the will (and lack of ethical restraint)