The Case For Embryo Selection Or Gene Editing
Despite what the ignorant sadistic control freak Chicken Littles who have scared people about small number of gene selections/manipulations, labelling those involved as monsters even at the very low number of 2 additional mutations, human gene mutations happen naturally and regularly in significant numbers, especially with respect to the age of the fathers. It is very naive if those Chicken Littles thought that no mutation will happen in "normal" pregnancies.
The US CDC has kept a dataset on the number of newborn babies with readily observable inherited disorders due to gene mutations. For year 2020 mulfunction genetic disorders can be observed in early age and whose fathers were as young as 20 years old. Though the probability of having genetic disorders increases with the father age, there are less fathers over the age of 45 and in absulute numbers the babies with genetic disorders are mostly from fathers between the age of 20 to 45, i.e. from the average 'young' families, not from those overly elderly. Yet so many simpleton suckers taking the diarheas from the ignorant Chicken Littles seriously without consideration to those families whose suffering could be averted.
Although there are many studies on the effects of paternal age on genetic diseases, most concentrated on sperm quality, quantify and mobility. There is a Icelandic study which concentrated on the causality due to parent ages.
doi:10.1038/nature11396
"Rate of de novo mutations, father’s age, and disease risk"
We conducted a study of genomewide mutation rate by sequencing the entire genomes of 78 Icelandic parent-offspring trios at high coverage. Here we show that in our samples, with an average father’s age of 29.7, the average de novo mutation rate is 1.20×10−8 per nucleotide per generation. Most strikingly, the diversity in mutation rate of single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) is dominated by the age of the father at conception of the child. The effect is an increase of about 2 mutations per year. After accounting for random Poisson variation, father’s age is estimated to explain nearly all of the remaining variation in the de novo mutation counts. These observations shed light on the importance of the father’s age on the risk of diseases such as schizophrenia and autism.
In summary it was found that on average the father will introduce 2.01 additional mutations per chronological year, i.e. the additional 2 mutations those ignorant simpleton Chicken Littles so freaking out is TECHNICALLY EQUIVALENT TO THE FATHER BEING ONE ADDITONAL YEAR OLDER. From the US CDC data, the average age of the fathers weighted by the number of babies is 31.96 years old. Given that human male reaches sexual maturity at about age 15, the 'average' US father will have introduced additional 34 new mutations directly due to him. Thus the ignorant Chicken Littles are implicitly asseted that the 'average' US fathers are 17x bigger 'monsters'.
While human sperms are regularly being produced and new genetic mistakes can be introduced with time, the Icelandic study found that for human female the number of and genetic composition of the human eggs remain the same after the development from the embryo state and that on average the human eggs will have about 14.2 mutations irrespective of the mother's age though the probability of being fertilized will decrease with time. Thus the ignorant Chicken Little's assertion implicitly accuses that the US 'average' mothers are 7x bigger monsters. Thus if those ignorant Chicken Littles are parents themselves they are implicitly very much bigger monsters themselves.
The correlations of mutations with early detected problems like schizophrenia and autism with respect to the father's age can readily be shown. The suffuring of the affected families could be mitigated if embryo selection or genomic editing are available. There could be more genetic diseases manifested later in life of the babies.
PS: I have no financial interest in embryo selection or gene editing business.
