15 years ago when I was studying this actively I could have sent you my top 20 favorite academic papers on the subject, or recommended a particular chapter of a particular textbook. I no longer remember these specifics. Now I can only gesture vaguely at Google scholar and search terms like “fetal neurogenesis” or “fetal prefrontal cortex development”. I did this, and browsed through a hundred or so paper titles, and then a dozen or so abstracts, and then skimmed three or four of the most promising papers, and then selected this one for you. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-021-01137-9
Seems like a pretty comprehensive overview which doesn’t get too lost in minor technical detail.
More importantly, I can give you my takeaway from years of reading many many papers on the subject.
If you want to make a genius baby, there are lots more factors involved than simply neuron count. Messing about with generic changes is hard, and you need to test your ideas in animal models first, and the whole process can take years even ignoring ethical considerations or budget.
There is an easier and more effective way to get super genius babies, and that method should be exhausted before resorting to genetic engineering.
The easy way: find a really smart woman, ideally young. Surgically remove one of her ovaries. Collect sperm from a bunch of very smart men (ideally with diverse genetic backgrounds). Have a team of hundreds of scientists carefully fertilize many thousands of eggs from the ovary.
Grow them all into blastocysts, and run a high fidelity genetic sequencing on all of them. Using what we know about the genes associated with intelligence, pick the top 20 who seem likely to be the smartest. Implant those in surrogate mothers. Take good care of the mothers.
This is likely to get you multiple nobel level geniuses, and possibly a human smarter than has ever been born before.
Raise the children in a special accelerated education environment.
I think this would work, and it doesn’t require any novel technology.
But it would take a while to raise the children… (Credit to Stephen Hsu for the idea)
15 years ago when I was studying this actively I could have sent you my top 20 favorite academic papers on the subject, or recommended a particular chapter of a particular textbook. I no longer remember these specifics. Now I can only gesture vaguely at Google scholar and search terms like “fetal neurogenesis” or “fetal prefrontal cortex development”. I did this, and browsed through a hundred or so paper titles, and then a dozen or so abstracts, and then skimmed three or four of the most promising papers, and then selected this one for you. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-021-01137-9 Seems like a pretty comprehensive overview which doesn’t get too lost in minor technical detail.
More importantly, I can give you my takeaway from years of reading many many papers on the subject. If you want to make a genius baby, there are lots more factors involved than simply neuron count. Messing about with generic changes is hard, and you need to test your ideas in animal models first, and the whole process can take years even ignoring ethical considerations or budget.
There is an easier and more effective way to get super genius babies, and that method should be exhausted before resorting to genetic engineering.
The easy way: find a really smart woman, ideally young. Surgically remove one of her ovaries. Collect sperm from a bunch of very smart men (ideally with diverse genetic backgrounds). Have a team of hundreds of scientists carefully fertilize many thousands of eggs from the ovary. Grow them all into blastocysts, and run a high fidelity genetic sequencing on all of them. Using what we know about the genes associated with intelligence, pick the top 20 who seem likely to be the smartest. Implant those in surrogate mothers. Take good care of the mothers. This is likely to get you multiple nobel level geniuses, and possibly a human smarter than has ever been born before. Raise the children in a special accelerated education environment. I think this would work, and it doesn’t require any novel technology. But it would take a while to raise the children… (Credit to Stephen Hsu for the idea)