Tobias Wolfram

Sociogenomics, Behavioral Genetics, Statistical Genetics @herasight

[Tobias Wolfram @_twolfram]

Every parent wants a happy child. So we built MDD-PGT, the first genetic predictor of depression for embryo screening.

Kids with a lower MDD-PGT tend to sleep better, fight less and enjoy jokes more. With 10 embryos, picking the lowest-risk one cuts depression risk by over 40%.

[billy @billyhumblebrag]

reading the METR report on RSI and then going to the ribbon cutting ceremony for the new on site recycling bins for my apartment block

[Ari Schulman @AriSchulman]

Nota bene: Central to Amodei's vision for how AI will "cure" mental illness is genetic screening, meaning he expects human reproduction via sex to be largely replaced by mass embryo production and mass screening in labs on this same timeline:

[Nuno Carvalho @nunorgcarvalho]

In thinking about the different types of heritabilities, I am drawn to consider broad-sense and narrow-sense heritability as the only "real" heritabilities, while others (like SNP and GWAS heritability) more just tell us about the choice of estimator

[Alex Strudwick Young @AlexTISYoung]

Valius very kindly helped me with my case for free, and their analyses have been very useful.

[Khoa Vu @KhoaVuUmn]

The fact that two Huangs are involved in an affair, but only one takes the blame is commonly known as Jensen's Inequality.

[Rob Wiblin @robertwiblin]

So Jensen was having an affair with a customer, who also happened to be a Chinese spy, for months.

Lied to the board. Lied to journalists.

Meanwhile pushing to sell maximum of cutting edge AI chips to China against advice of ~entire natsec community.

Can't make this shit up.

[Herasight @herasight]

Herasight spoke at the second annual conference of the Reproductive Genetics Institute in Berkeley, CA.

Our first talk, by Jonathan Anomaly, addresses what constitutes informed choice in the context of polygenic embryo screening
https://t.co/W4RkRowByx

[Alexander Kustov @akoustov]

Most studies find immigration doesn't move local crime rates. Sascha Riaz's guest post shows such studies are often null by design. Inflows are often so small that even careful studies of exogenous shocks can detect only implausibly large crime gaps between migrants and natives.

[Tobias Wolfram @_twolfram]

@mis_ordo_amoris @merelyjwright Sigh, if you are not interested in having a conversation based on the actual scientific merits of our work I don't really see a benefit on continuing this conversation. Cya.

[Tobias Wolfram @_twolfram]

Every parent wants a happy child. So we built MDD-PGT, the first genetic predictor of depression for embryo screening.

Kids with a lower MDD-PGT tend to sleep better, fight less and enjoy jokes more. With 10 embryos, picking the lowest-risk one cuts depression risk by over 40%.

[Tobias Wolfram @_twolfram]

Please read the paper or at least the thread. This is not about biomarkers. This is about running a genome-wide association study where you look at the genome of hundreds of thousands to millions of people and you try to find associations between genetic variation and the phenotype in question. You then build a so-called polygenic score from that and you validate it by looking at a sample of people that the algorithm has never seen before (ideally siblings). You compare whether the sibling with a higher polygenic score also has a higher risk of depression.

[Tobias Wolfram @_twolfram]

@bossert_l @Geneticus0 🙄 The canary's purpose is to die so others get a warning. That's the job you're assigning to depressed kids.

[Tobias Wolfram @_twolfram]

@bossert_l @Geneticus0 What am I deciding? We are simply making information available to parents. Do you think they should not have the right to know about the disease risks their embryos carry when they decide which one to transfer?

[Tobias Wolfram @_twolfram]

@bossert_l @Geneticus0 In fact me studying social science for a few semesters was what got me into statistics and eventually statistical genetics.

[Tobias Wolfram @_twolfram]

@DoctorPerin Like what?

[Reprogenetics Institute @Reprogenetics_]

Should polygenic embryo scores be kept from parents because probability is confusing? Dr. Jonathan Anomaly, co-founder of Herasight, spoke at Reproductive Frontiers 2026 about enabling informed choice that's better than government control.

YouTube link in reply. ⬇️

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Intro
00:01:36 Informed choice vs. paternalism
00:02:59 Genetic testing laws in Europe
00:06:23 Reasons to restrict testing
00:08:07 Decision fatigue and the paradox of choice
00:14:31 Complex, probabilistic choices are everywhere
00:17:57 How companies can promote informed choice
00:19:54 Pleiotropy
00:29:10 Presenting results; closing thoughts
00:33:23 Q&A

[Tobias Wolfram @_twolfram]

@faintghostglow Hi, it's Major Depressive Disorder - Preimplantation Genetic Testing. It follows the naming convention we established with our Cog-PGT cognition predictor last year.

[Tobias Wolfram @_twolfram]

Sorry, missed this. It is an interesting result, for sure, but I'd mainly attribute it to generational age gaps when estimating parent-offspring correlations. Look at Kendler et al. 2018, siblings reared apart results are pretty in line with twin results there. Furthermore this is mostly an academic question with respect to our approach, as it only matters for the effect of family history on the expected risk reducton. The performance of the polygenic score itself is completely independent of any twin modeling assumptions. Because we are validating our scores within family (meaning we look at the differences in PGS between siblings on their phenotypes), our effect estimates do not suffer from genetic nurture/indirect effect biases.

[Tobias Wolfram @_twolfram]

@webmasterdave @MicahWestfall That really, really means a lot to me. It is all very blunt and not as effective as it should be right now, but let's see where the (surprisingly near) future will take us.

[Tobias Wolfram @_twolfram]

@webmasterdave @MicahWestfall Thank you! Your work has been a massive inspiration to everything that we are doing.

[Tobias Wolfram @_twolfram]

What exactly do you find so horrifying? When people go through IVF, either for fertility reasons or because they froze eggs at some point, it is often the case that they have to decide which out of multiple morphologically and chromosomally healthy embryos to transfer. In agreement with my phenotype, I score in the 98% percentile of this predictor and because depressive dispositions are to a significant part heritable, I would rather like to minimize the chance of passing them on to my children. If somebody else suffers from a family history of breast cancer or schizophrenia, would you also condemn them for screening their embryos for it?