If a couple produces 50 zygotes togather, and the mother and father test all of them, and pick the one that sounds like it has the most appealing traits that a couple might envision together, and discard the rest, would that count as "design"?

This process sounds like it's half a step away from that. The half-step being that they only mention testing the parents, and then the process permits a degree of hypothesizing about possible children. Meanwhile, how hard would it be to test an embryo in utero, and then make a shallow, superficial decision about the pregnancy?

The process is practical and ethical, when considering it's utility for assessing the risk of inherited, incurable diseases tied to varying combinations of dominant or recessive genes, but it's a flimsy assumption that it will solely be used for only those scenarios.

There will be couples with known risk factors, who will want to roll the dice and try anyway, because they love eachother and want a family, and then they check their pregnancy in utero for things like downs syndrome. But then, if you have the options in front of you, why not check out other characteristics too?

And then, if couple A was allowed to do that, and this is a business, after all... Why not couple B? This couple who has no life threatening conditions or genetic combinations, but has the money, and the confidentialitiy of protected health information laws shrouding their decisions in secrecy.

In 20 years, don't be surprised when a certain cross-section of humanity suddenly looks strikingly different, but without any obvious explanation.

I'm not sure I see this happening to any great degree. We have had the ability to know the sex of babies in advance for decades, and there are still many parents who prefer to leave it as a surprise. If there are still so many people who don't even want to know the gender of their baby before it is born, how many are going to want to make any kind of changes to it.

Also, there are still a great many people who are very suspicious of any new medical technology and would not want to take any risks when it comes to a child.

"Many" is meaningless. There will also be "many" who will do exactly this as soon as possible. It's already possible to run certain tests during pregnancy, and it's legal to have an abortion based on the test results. One of my friends in high school was pre-nataly diagnosed with spina bifida and the doctor recommended an abortion.

I think this is true, but wow that article is such an impressive fireworks display of abstract optimistic language and marketing-ese that I have only a shadow of an idea of what they actually do -- as I'm sure was intended.

You're possibly right. But I don't see it as following from the linked post.

That's what the technology is doing, but the patent covers more than that. Typical immoral assheadery.

Are you taking offense to the intellectual property issue or the ability to influence the genetics of your offspring?

I don't know about the parent, but to me the combination definitely sounds like "immoral assheadery."

These guys seem to have a lot of patents#. Some of them seem (to me) like something you shouldn't be able to patent.^ It's a little creepy (but very easy) to imagine a future where most (rich) children are engineered by selectively accepting zygotes, sperms/eggs or actually creating them.

I don't know much about the economics or laws of IP, but I would really prefer that all the critical technology and data needed for engineering babies be treated as scientific discovery and available publicly.

#https://www.google.com/search?num=100&safe=off&biw=1024&bih=...

^https://www.google.ie/patents/US8510057?dq=23andMe&hl=en&sa=...

I'm taking offense to the subject matter being patentable at all.