My husband and I have recently been considering starting a family together (i.e., having children). Naturally, wanting to give my children the best chance at a healthy, successful life, I spent some time over the past several weeks personally surveying the landscape of embryo selection companies. These companies essentially facilitate in vitro fertilization by using polygenic scores to help you select the ‘best’ embryo.
This post isn’t meant as an introduction to the field of polygenic testing; for those who want a broader overview, Scott Alexander’s recent post recent post is an excellent primer which compares the current players in the field. Instead, the purpose of this post is simple: as I started learning more about Nucleus Genomics and researching their newly launched product, Nucleus Origin, I noticed a number of increasingly bizarre inconsistencies and errors in their promotional content. In addition, I also noticed that they are apparently currently being sued by a competitor, Genomic Prediction, for what appears to be egregious IP theft.
Upon further exploration, I realized that their entire Nucleus Origin whitepaper, touted as a novel AI breakthrough in the field of “genetic optimization,” was essentially full of basic errors that were so flagrant that a dilettante in the field like myself was able to spot them with a cursory review. Worse, the entire whitepaper appears to have been cribbed wholesale from a competitor’s medRxiv preprint.
After conducting more background research, I concluded that Nucleus Origin was essentially meant as a response to a competitor’s whitepaper claiming to show that Nucleus systematically misrepresents the predictive validity of their polygenic scores (PGS). The claims in that whitepaper, if true, are fairly damning and, even after the release of the Nucleus Origin whitepaper, largely go unaddressed. I strongly recommend that any reader curious to learn more about Nucleus also spend some time closely reading the linked critique.
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Choose life.