Embryo selection and economic discounting

My wife and I are planning to have children soon, and we will be using embryo selection to improve our family’s future well-being. Basically, the idea is that we can take a small sample of cells from each embryo, analyze their DNA, and use the genetic information to help choose which embryos we want to implant.These days, polygenic scores are good at predicting risk for a lot of diseases, like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s. And companies like Herasight or Genomic Prediction often give an “embryo health score”1 that takes an average of the predicted risk for each disease, weighted by how bad each disease is.But how are those weights calculated? And can we do better?Disability-adjusted life yearsDiseases are bad in two ways: they can make you die, and they can make your life worse. The “disability-adjusted life year” (DALY) metric captures both of these, by combining years of life lost and years of reduced quality of life (using a factor between 0 and 1…

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