Are embryos people? The answer will determine the future of reproductive medicine

Eric Forman
Statnews.com
Originally posted July 24, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

The goal of this process is to achieve a healthy child, which now occurs at a remarkably high rate. For specific genetic disorders, preimplantation genetic testing can reduce the odds of having a child with a lethal disorder from 25 to 50 percent to less than 1 percent.

Medicine’s ability to culture embryos and select healthy ones has improved dramatically in the last few years. A clinical trial that I led several years ago showed that transferring a single genetically tested normal embryo resulted in the same delivery rate as transferring multiple untested embryos. When genetic testing is performed, it is now standard of care to transfer just a single embryo at a time — gone are the days of risky triplet and high-order multiples after IVF. Actual babies, not embryos, are being spared from dying from the complications of genetic diseases and severe prematurity thanks to the increased use of single-embryo transfer afforded by preimplantation genetic testing.

The information is here.

Cognitive Economics: How Self-Organization and Collective Intelligence Works

Geoff Mulgan
evonomics.com
Originally published December 22, 2017

Here are two excerpts:

But self-organization is not an altogether-coherent concept and has often turned out to be misleading as a guide to collective intelligence. It obscures the work involved in organization and in particular the hard work involved in high-dimensional choices. If you look in detail at any real example—from the family camping trip to the operation of the Internet, open-source software to everyday markets, these are only self-organizing if you look from far away. Look more closely and different patterns emerge. You quickly find some key shapers—like the designers of underlying protocols, or the people setting the rules for trading. There are certainly some patterns of emergence. Many ideas may be tried and tested before only a few successful ones survive and spread. To put it in the terms of network science, the most useful links survive and are reinforced; the less useful ones wither. The community decides collectively which ones are useful. Yet on closer inspection, there turn out to be concentrations of power and influence even in the most decentralized communities, and when there’s a crisis, networks tend to create temporary hierarchies—or at least the successful ones do—to speed up decision making. As I will show, almost all lasting examples of social coordination combine some elements of hierarchy, solidarity, and individualism.

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Here we see a more common pattern. The more dimensional any choice is, the more work is needed to think it through. If it is cognitively multidimensional, we may need many people and more disciplines to help us toward a viable solution. If it is socially dimensional, then there is no avoiding a good deal of talk, debate, and argument on the way to a solution that will be supported. And if the choice involves long feedback loops, where results come long after actions have been taken, there is the hard labor of observing what actually happens and distilling conclusions. The more dimensional the choice in these senses, the greater the investment of time and cognitive energy needed to make successful decisions.

Again, it is possible to overshoot: to analyze a problem too much or from too many angles, bring too many people into the conversation, or wait too long for perfect data and feedback rather than relying on rough-and-ready quicker proxies. All organizations struggle to find a good enough balance between their allocation of cognitive resources and the pressures of the environment they’re in. But the long-term trend of more complex societies is to require ever more mediation and intellectual labor of this kind.

The article is here.