Malcolm and Simone Collins sit down with Jonathan Anomaly (Director of Research & Communication at Herasight) to finally reveal the company they’ve been quietly working with for years on embryo genetic selection.

After years of secrecy, we dive deep into:

• How Herasight achieves dramatically superior polygenic risk scores compared to competitors

• The recent drama and plagiarism allegations surrounding Nucleus Genomics

• Why selecting for higher intelligence correlates with better health, lower addiction rates, more cooperative behavior, and overall life success

• The truth about pleiotropy: why selecting for positive traits almost never comes with serious downsides

• How Herasight’s patented technology allows parents anywhere in the world (even where PGT-P is banned) to get polygenic embryo reports

• The coming era of germline gene editing and why refusing these technologies may soon be seen as morally irresponsible

• Why this technology is fundamentally pro-natalist and will help high-fertility families have healthier, thriving children

This is one of the most important conversations happening right now about the future of humanity.

Learn more about Herasight here

Follow Jonathan Anomaly on X

Episode Transcript:
Malcolm Collins: . [00:00:00 ] Hello. I am excited to be here today because today we can talk about something that we have had to keep quiet for years which is, if you know the Collins family lore, it’s that we did a large batch of embryos because we had to, Simone was unable to get pregnant naturally, and we then did genetic sequencing on them to decide the order in which we did the implantation.

Now. For a long time we just had to say that we did this with a group of scientists. And when people were like, well, so people use this company or this company, we say, well, the company that they should probably be using isn’t out there yet. And the reason why this is really important when we’re talking about independent companies with good genetic data on humans is as time has gone on, the genetic data that is held in the public sphere by scientists and everything like that is.

Decreasing in quality. And specifically what I mean by this is there was a, the famous case where the national Biobank [00:01:00 ] in the UK ended up closing off their genetic access to a lot of publishers because one scientist accidentally found that one group was in the United States, was having daughter within the uk Your daughters

Simone Collins: within the uk Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: in the uk.

Something like 14000% the rate of any other group. And that was a naughty fact. And so now they’re like, now we need to screen all research for anything that could be naughty facts. The problem is, is that naughty facts are the facts we really need for humanity to move forwards, which includes things like genetic correlates to intelligence.

And the reason why I have been so impressed by this company, and, and it’s the reason we’re gonna be doing this and talking about this, not just about their work around intelligence and their work around the correlates to intelligence, which is really interesting because almost everything is correlated with intelligence.

So if you’re selecting for, if you’re like. I as a country will not allow people to select for intelligence. I will only allow heart health. You are also selecting for intelligence because these, these things are highly correlated with each other. So we’re gonna go into that. We’re gonna go into intelligence associations with social behavior patterns and everything like that because [00:02:00 ] obviously that’s important.

And we’re also gonna go into. Oh gosh.. I was just gonna say that now anyone can do this. So if you’re anywhere in the world, even if it’s illegal to do within your country, because Pgt PA is illegal to do genomics in country, they’ve got a unique technology that allows you to transfer p gt to BA stuff twofold, genomic stuff.

So we’re gonna move ahead with Johnny Anomaly an old friend of ours who is working with these guys. Yeah. So Johnny

Simone Collins: Anomaly is the director of Research and Communication of Parasite, which finally we can say is the company we’ve been working with on all these things that has been taking what we think is the most conscientious, thoughtful science, first detailed autistic in the best possible way approach to this.

Johnny Naly is a background as a bioethicist, and he’s just an overall awesome guy. He’s a major proponent of this technology and he’s kind of the. The gateway person to anyone who wants to enter this sphere and learn more about it. So we’re really grateful to you joining us today, Johnny. Thank you so [00:03:00 ] much.

And also, if we have a little bit of time to the end of this, I’d really love for you to dive in. Or maybe we could even start with it just ‘cause it’s like salacious drama, some drama that played out this week between sort of not just parasite and nucleus genomics, another company that gives apologetic risk or data to parents but also nucleus genomics and genomic predictions, which is another apologetic risk score company.

So just maybe to start, would you mind just telling us, because it helps us understand sort of how parasite is different and, and what other companies in this space are doing possibly wrong. What, what played out on X this week about nucleus genomics and another company in this space?

Jonathan Anomaly: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me guys.

And Yep. We’ve been working together and we have many common friends here in Austin and other places where I am. But let’s see here. So there was quite a bit of drama, and I didn’t get into this business for the drama. As, as you know, I, I wrote a book about this. I was an academic, I’d been interested in this topic long before [00:04:00 ] I, I went into the private sector and joined this company a few years ago.

So I really want things to be done well, and we stayed in stealth for a really long time, you know, more than three years. And the reason is we knew that, first of all, this is a nascent science. So the, the science of polygenic prediction that is using genomic data to predict traits about, let’s say embryos or, and by the way, this is why it’s not mysterious.

Or using it to, we might say, retrofit traits about past people. So for example, the Reich Lab at Harvard, David Reich wrote a book called Who We Are and How We Got Here, and he recreates the ancient past and migration patterns and, and even, and even makes inferences about the traits that people had in the past based on polygenic scores.

That’s so funny. This is not mysterious technology. We use it all the time in history and, and going forward in personalized medicine now for embryos. Nevertheless, I understood it was a nascent science. It’s, [00:05:00 ] it’s pretty new. It’s very complex. You need some of the world’s best statistical geneticist, and I’m not one, you know, I studied economics and philosophy.

That’s what I taught. But we hired some of the best and it takes a while, right, to lure him from academia. They knew Alex Young, for example, who’s our true superstar. He’s still at UCLA, but you know, he got in a little bit of hot water as soon as he announced that he was with us. Mm-hmm. Even though it’s like, what are we doing?

We’re reducing. Disease in the world and maybe marginally increasing intelligence a bit, but that’s considered controversial. So anyway, that’s just the background of why we were in stealth, why we wanted to hire the world’s best first. Do the best research, validate our predictors, and we can talk about how that’s done later.

And it was only then that we emerged from stealth. Nevertheless a company that had been around for a little while called Nucleus decided to launch just before everyone knew we were about to come out the closet. My gosh. And yeah, they had done [00:06:00 ] that a few months ago, just about a month or two before us and announced they were now going into doing embryo scoring.

And we took a look at some of their reports and found them, let’s just say lacking. And so we decided when we launched, we were gonna launch with a white paper. And Oh, I love hearing baby sounds. Only on your podcast. Is it one of the babies chosen the system.

Yeah. I

love it. This is beautiful. And we’ll talk about maybe Tism later too, but Nice.

But anyway, we, before we launch, we really wanted to make sure that we had validated the best predictors on the planet, made it really clear how we did that, et cetera. And as part of our initial validation paper, we have an appendix showing what Nucleus genomics was up to. And it was, it was not kind, but it was accurate.

Scott Alexander picked up on it and Scott also had talked about, you know, using us and, and that sort of thing. And he didn’t wanna be too partial. I mean, it was a, a partial endorsement of us, [00:07:00 ] but really a survey of the landscape, like what is the state of the art when it comes to this And

mm-hmm.

Anyway, that kicked off the initial controversy, but last week, last week, some anonymous blogger, I guess he’s a Chinese guy who lives in, in the Bay Area called Siwan Malala, like bad Sichuan. Yeah. He decided to do a pretty thorough takedown of Nucleus. Some of it was citing our earlier work. And then apparently Nucleus found our work so good, our white paper, that they decided to more or less copy and paste it without citation as, as their own.

And so. You know, it