I would expect that most of the cases where parents do embryo selection, they put a lot of trust into the clinic that provides the service.
Strictly speaking, you don’t have to put a lot of trust into the PGD provider. It’s like testing cloned dogs—how do you know Sooam (run by a notorious fraudster) or ViaGen didn’t cheat you and provide you a $1k dog which just looks a lot like your old one? Well, you just compare the genome of the new one to the old one—there’s no way to fake that without cloning! (You use a consumer dog genetics company like Embark, 23andMe-style, for both; so really quite easy & cheap if you want to check if you were cheated on your $50-100k purchase.) Genetics is a lot like cryptography in that checking is often cheap while faking may require astronomical luck or resources.
If they provide genotyping from the embryos and the parents have even ordinary genotyping like $130 23andMe (on sale), one can confirm that the embryo genotyping is accurate by comparison to the parents. If the PGD provider receives only the finished embryos and not any sperm/egg parental samples, how, even if they were maliciously attempting to fake sequencing to cheat the parents, could they do so? As most clinics do not specialize in this sort of Orchid or GenPred-style service and outsource stuff, this is not even that unusual. Since you can ensure accuracy of sequencing of the embryos collectively, what’s left for them to cheat you with? Swapping the labels of the embryos? Yeah I suppose they could, but that doesn’t benefit them in any way—and even that can be detected by sequencing the resulting baby.
As far as I understand embryo testing is not just about doing genetic testing. It’s also about implanting the chosen embryo in the womb in a way that has few adverse side effects.
Strictly speaking, you don’t have to put a lot of trust into the PGD provider. It’s like testing cloned dogs—how do you know Sooam (run by a notorious fraudster) or ViaGen didn’t cheat you and provide you a $1k dog which just looks a lot like your old one? Well, you just compare the genome of the new one to the old one—there’s no way to fake that without cloning! (You use a consumer dog genetics company like Embark, 23andMe-style, for both; so really quite easy & cheap if you want to check if you were cheated on your $50-100k purchase.) Genetics is a lot like cryptography in that checking is often cheap while faking may require astronomical luck or resources.
If they provide genotyping from the embryos and the parents have even ordinary genotyping like $130 23andMe (on sale), one can confirm that the embryo genotyping is accurate by comparison to the parents. If the PGD provider receives only the finished embryos and not any sperm/egg parental samples, how, even if they were maliciously attempting to fake sequencing to cheat the parents, could they do so? As most clinics do not specialize in this sort of Orchid or GenPred-style service and outsource stuff, this is not even that unusual. Since you can ensure accuracy of sequencing of the embryos collectively, what’s left for them to cheat you with? Swapping the labels of the embryos? Yeah I suppose they could, but that doesn’t benefit them in any way—and even that can be detected by sequencing the resulting baby.
As far as I understand embryo testing is not just about doing genetic testing. It’s also about implanting the chosen embryo in the womb in a way that has few adverse side effects.