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How much does egg freezing cost in 2026?

The cost of egg freezing usually arrives as a single figure on a clinic page, weeks before the first consultation. It's a five-figure number large enough to change a year's savings plan, and a careful reader can see it against her bank balance long before she knows what's actually in it.

May 14, 2026

Polygenic scores across ancestries: why the accuracy gap is a methods problem, not a biology problem

If you're not of European descent and you've looked into polygenic screening, you've probably hit the same wall: most genetic risk scores were built on data from white people, and their accuracy drops (sometimes by more than half) when applied to anyone else. That's a real problem. Cross-ancestry accuracy, meaning how well genetic predictions perform across different ancestral backgrounds, has been the field's biggest equity failure. A 2019 study by Martin et al. found that polygenic risk scores were several times more accurate in Europeans than in anyone else, with accuracy losses exceeding 75% in African populations. For years, it looked like polygenic screening might be fundamentally limited to one slice of humanity.

May 7, 2026

Schizophrenia is one of the most heritable conditions nobody screens for

The parents who ask us about schizophrenia screening have usually been thinking about it for a long time. They watched a father lose a job, a sister stop calling, a son move back home in his twenties. They know what a first break looks like, because they've already been there when it happened to someone they love.

May 5, 2026

Is Rheumatoid Arthritis Hereditary? The Polygenic Answer for IVF Families

Rheumatoid arthritis is a parent's morning stiffness, the rotation of DMARDs on the kitchen counter, the two-month rhythm of rheumatology appointments, and the slow recalibration of what a good day looks like. Yes, RA runs in families, but not the way a single-gene disease does.

May 4, 2026

What New York Magazine Gets Right About Embryo Screening, and What It Misses

Christopher Cox's New York Magazine piece raises the right anxiety about polygenic embryo screening: this category is easy to market badly. Probabilistic science can sound deterministic. Relative-risk numbers can make small absolute differences look dramatic. Many IVF cycles produce too few embryos for another layer of scoring to change the transfer decision. And ancestry calibration is still unfinished work across the field.

May 3, 2026

The '2.5 IQ points' claim: why a 2019 height-and-IQ study doesn't apply to disease screening

If you're a prospective parent researching polygenic embryo screening, you've almost certainly hit this claim: a 2019 study in Cell found that screening embryos for height and IQ would gain "only about 2.5 IQ points." It shows up in Science magazine, in policy discussions, and in pretty much every article arguing that embryo screening has "limited utility." There are two problems with how that study gets used.

May 1, 2026

Coronary Artery Disease: Hereditary Risk and Embryo Screening

When a parent has a heart attack in their fifties, or a sibling gets put on a statin in their forties, pretty much everyone in the family starts doing the quiet math about their kids. The honest answer to what they're asking is yes: a meaningful share of that risk is inherited. Twin studies put the heritability of coronary artery disease somewhere between 40% and 60%, with one Swedish registry following 20,966 twins for 36 years and landing at 0.57 for men and 0.38 for women.

May 1, 2026

How Accurate Is PGT Testing?

If you just got PGT results back, you probably want a straight answer: can I trust these numbers? It depends which numbers you're looking at. If your embryo came back euploid or aneuploid, yes. Those calls are reliable. But if you got a mosaic result, the honest answer is that the classification itself is only right about half the time.

April 30, 2026

Breast cancer: hereditary risk and embryo screening

Most families who worry about hereditary breast cancer are thinking about one thing: BRCA. That's understandable. BRCA is the name that shows up in genetic testing ads, in conversations at the oncologist's office, and in the news. But BRCA mutations account for roughly 3% of all breast cancer cases. The other 97% involve a completely different kind of genetic risk, one most families have never heard of.

April 28, 2026

Is Type 1 Diabetes Hereditary?

The conversation sits behind almost every search for "is Type 1 diabetes hereditary." A clinician said the words "higher risk." No baseline, no scale, no sense of whether "higher" means a couple of percentage points or a near-certainty. The math is doable. It just didn't get done in the room. For a future parent with T1D in the picture (yours, your partner's, or a sibling's), the honest answer is short, and most pages give it badly. Type 1 diabetes is one of the most heritable common diseases we know of. Most children of T1D parents never develop the disease. Both halves of that sentence are true at the same time, and the gap between them is exactly where a family-planning decision lives.

April 27, 2026

Is embryo screening eugenics? The history, the science, and the real concern

The word "eugenics" gets thrown at embryo screening a lot. It's a serious accusation, and it deserves a serious answer, so here's the strongest version of the charge: screening embryos for genetic disease risk is, functionally, the same project that led to forced sterilization programs in the early twentieth century. Choosing one embryo over another based on genetics is ranking human lives by their DNA.

April 17, 2026

Herasight vs Orchid: what actually separates two embryo screening companies

Five euploid embryos. Two screening companies. Both will rank your embryos by genetic disease risk. Both will hand you a report with numbers that look precise. The numbers aren't measuring the same thing. Herasight and Orchid are both CAP-accredited and CLIA-certified, with labs in North Carolina. Both offer preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic conditions (PGT-P) with counseling included. MIT Technology Review named embryo scoring one of its 10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2026. On a spec sheet, these two companies look interchangeable. They aren't.

April 16, 2026

PGT testing: three tests, three different questions about your embryos

If your clinic has mentioned PGT, chances are they presented it as one thing: PGT-A, a chromosome count. What they probably didn't tell you is that there are two other forms of preimplantation genetic testing, and they answer completely different questions about your embryos. The difference matters more than most families realize.

April 15, 2026

Why only 12% of reproductive clinicians approve of polygenic embryo screening

If you're a reproductive endocrinologist or genetic counselor, you've probably settled on some version of this: polygenic embryo screening is interesting, but not ready. Professional societies urge caution. The evidence base is still developing. Better to wait.

March 30, 2026

Is intelligence hereditary? Yes. Most public discussion gets the science wrong.

If you're going through IVF and you've got a family history of sharp people (or not-so-sharp people), chances are you've wondered how much of that gets passed on. Maybe you've Googled "is intelligence hereditary" looking for a clean number. The short answer is: a lot. Cognitive ability is one of the most heritable traits in human genetics.

March 27, 2026

PGT is four different tests hiding behind one acronym

PGT is a set of genetic tests run on embryos before transfer. Depending on which type, it can tell you whether an embryo has the right number of chromosomes, whether it carries a specific inherited mutation, or what its overall risk looks like for common conditions like heart disease, Alzheimer's, and schizophrenia.

March 26, 2026

Your age isn't the problem. Your embryo's chromosomes might be.

If you're over 35 and going through IVF, chances are your RE has shown you the chart. You know the one. Success rates drop off a cliff around your age and approach zero by the early forties. It's one of the first things they show you, and it's hard to unsee.

March 25, 2026

Trained on strangers, tested on siblings

If you've looked into polygenic embryo screening, you've probably come across accuracy numbers. A score "explains 20% of disease variance." An AUC of 0.75. Those numbers come from real published research, and they look solid.

March 25, 2026

The doctors who dismiss PGT-P have almost never used it

You asked your fertility doctor about polygenic embryo screening, and they told you it's not ready. Maybe they said the science isn't there yet. Maybe they said professional societies recommend against it. You left the appointment feeling like the question was settled.

March 23, 2026

Polygenic embryo screening: what it is and why the critics were wrong about it

Polygenic embryo screening is a type of genetic screening available to parents going through IVF that estimates each embryo's predisposition toward common diseases. It can be used to reduce a future child's risk of type 2 diabetes, breast cancer, Alzheimer's, heart disease, and more. It's a significantly more comprehensive version of the genetic testing that's been available for decades, which could only screen for conditions caused by a single gene, like cystic fibrosis.

March 20, 2026