The Ledger, every show

“This is the first time a company has partnered with a couple who have optimized their embryos on the basis of intelligence.”

“We believe that every piece of information from cancer to IQ to schizophrenia belongs very thoughtfully in the hands of the patient, and the patient is the one, not the doctor, that the patient is the one that should pick their embryo.”

“So usually parents have a couple viable embryos, and now they can actually take the raw DNA files of them, upload to Nucleus, and we'll give you analysis on everything from cancers, to IQ, to eye color, to hair color, to schizophrenia risk.”

“And so you're going to see the rapid decrease in cost of IVF combined with the rapid decrease in cost of sequencing A genome. These things are going to converge together to enable this just, this massive, massive new generation of parents having genetically op…”

“Because eventually, you're not just going to be sequencing and analyzing DNA, You'll also probably be editing it as well.”

“From our perspective as a company, there's really no difference between diseases and traits. It's a false line in the sand that was drawn.”

“Toilet meat technology missing millions and millions of genetic markers. Effectively, it's not actually useful for any really disease risk assessment.”

“At the frontier of science, we do already have associations with genetics and intelligence, and we really believe in giving these insights to customers.”

“There was actually a really good study that was done asking couples about genetic optimization, which is, you know, what's their perspective on it. And in the study, it said over 50% of people said genetic optimization for something like IQ is fine. And then I…”

“Embryo selection will always be a relative optimization, right? IQ can explain a couple IQ points, right? Height, you can, you know, explain a couple inches, but principally if you, the most important kind of the ingredients for your embryos comes from mom and…”

“You can still dramatically reduce the baby's risk, for example, for something like Alzheimer's, Which is then strongly associated with longevity or breast cancer or coronary artery disease, which are the top killers in the United States today.”

“And when you think about the next 10 years, you know, as I alluded to earlier, sequencing technology is kind of cheaper, analysis is kind of cheaper, understand the genome is going to dramatically increase, and genome editing is going to become much cheaper. A…”

“They really viewed data gathering as a means to make drugs, but because it's such a small sliver of your DNA, you actually can't really make drugs off of it”

“One of the most shocking things about 23 means is it's actually not HIPAA compliant, right? It doesn't follow the gold standard clinical regulations that ensure your data is safeguarded.”

“I really do think in the next decade, You're going to see the rise of a consumer health behemoth, and that consumer health behemoth is going to have a whole genome, the entire of someone's DNA at its foundation, and it's going to impact not just someone's heal…”

“You can't. From genetics predicts someone's IQ. And actually what a lot of people don't realize is you will never be able to. And the reason for that is because 50% of intelligence is environmental. The other 50% is genetic.”

“I think we're in the age where there will be a trillion dollar consumer healthcare business, and that business is going to be integrated in the entirety of someone's health data on the platform.”

“I think genetic testing technology and analysis technology, genome technology, if you will, It's going to be as powerful as artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is ultimately a tool, and it's a tool that's going to, I think, be most consequential i…”

“You go from Blockbuster to Netflix, you go from, you know, Blackberry to the iPhone, you go from MySpace to Facebook, and now you're going from 23 and Me to Nucleus Genomics, right? The industry is wide open, Nucleus is years ahead, and we're going to seize th…”

“I think one thing this nucleus actively is looking into right now, considering whether it makes sense, you know, earlier, I'm sure you remember, you know, we explored the possibility of acquiring and we're looking into right now whether that would make sense t…”

“Nucleus IQ, the function of it is not to predict your IQ score. The way it works is it basically tells you people with similar genetics to you, how they tend to score on an IQ test.”

“I think we can actually, I think two years from now, we can get half a million samples. Two years from today, I think we could do that.”

“There's all this research, there's all these insights, there's all this innovation, right? But we're stuck with Do you like chocolate or not from 23 and me? Like, what's going on here, right?”

“I emailed, under pseudonym, just to be honest with you, under pseudonym, our, again, current chief scientific officer, and I asked him, like, you know, 50 questions, right? And he was kind enough to actually, he answered all the questions.”

“Even though the best predictor we have today, actually in the world, the best polygenic predictor is for height.”

“These are conditions that, generally speaking, are just simply not tested in the clinic today. So let's say you're a couple doing IVF. The first thing that's very well accepted in the IVF context is making sure your child doesn't have any chromosomal abnormali…”

“And so you see this testing from preconception to conception, and now even after birth, we're going to be exploring as well.”

“Because fundamentally, through the rise of the whole genome test, you can actually combine every single one of these applications. You can combine, you know, kind of ancestry, Natera, Myriad, IVF genetic testing companies, PGX companies, all into one roof, int…”

“And you can see here how, even though I'm dramatically higher genetic risk, right? 2.48, I think is in the 99.3 percentile. My overall risk is 1.43%.”

“There is an inevitability that there's going to be this kind of exponential proliferation in this whole genome data, and someone's going to have to build this kind of application layer for DNA, like that, that, of course that's going to happen, right? I mean, …”

“And what people don't, I think, understand or have a good intuition for is that when you get deep enough into any scientific discipline or any field, you start seeing old intellectual cracks. So you understand two things. One of the things you understand is, w…”

“If you think about relentlessness, to me it's kind of, it means like a pathological motivation. Like you're pathologically motivated. And where does pathological motivation come from? It comes from, I think, two things. It comes from love and fear.”

“If the fundamental, if the intellectual fundamentals are strong enough, you can re-derive anything.”

“He ran this, like, academic site that gave people kind of D to C polygenic scores. It's kind of an eugenic analysis. And of course, I don't know, maybe a year later, year and a half later, we actually acquired it and bring him on.”

“I mean, I think the statistic is that one in 50 babies today are born via IVF.”

“And then also we want to continue to build up that platform beyond just genetics, blood, wearables, URI analysis, full body MRIs, and beyond into a true consumer health application.”

“Some of our big boy investors is in my, you know, they currently text me saying, what can we do here?”

“23 me, the cost of actually sequencing all of someone's DNA, you know, getting the entire read of it, not a small fraction, all of it was around ten million dollars per sample.”

“23 and me, they got started in 2006, the cost of sequencing the genome at that point was around twenty million dollars per sample, ok. So they couldn't actually employ the technology to read the entirety of someone's DNA, all six billion letters. They opted fo…”

“I actually had a rule to myself. The rule was I would not say anything about a company. It's a project. It's, I, I'm just doing research.”

“We're only 14 people full-time.”