title: Attend the 2026 Reproductive Frontiers Summit, June 16–18, Berkeley
author: TsviBT
contenttype: lesswrongpost
publication: LessWrong
published: 2026-03-22T21:15:50.968000+00:00
source_url: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JLYHKEFF8jBhy9tvs/attend-the-2026-reproductive-frontiers-summit-june-16-18
word_count: 2544
We’ll be hosting the 2026 Reproductive Frontiers Summit at Lighthaven in Berkeley, CA, on June 16—18. Come join us if you want to learn, connect, think, and coordinate about the future of germline engineering technology. Very early bird tickets are available now until the end of March.
Who will be there?
Our lineup of speakers includes experts in the areas of polygenic prediction, embryo gene editing, in vitro gametogenesis, artificial wombs, ethics and regulation for advanced reproductive technology, and more. See the full list on the summit website: reproductivefrontiers.org.
We hope to welcome attendees who are:
scientists (new or established) who are interested in advanced reproductive technology or reprogenetics, especially experts or future experts in:
stem cell biology, embryology, epigenetics of the germ line, bioinformatics, polygenic prediction of traits, editing methods (especially epigenetic editing and precision gene editing), ovarian culture, gametogenesis, chromosome dynamics and engineering, low-input *omics, single-cell microfluidics, and related topics;
experts on regulation and policy, financing, and public opinion around advanced reprotech;
bioethicists who want to use constructive critique to craft a practicable vision of widely beneficial germline engineering technology;
undergrads, grad students, and postdocs who are interested in these topics;
investors who want to find opportunities;
philanthropists who want to accelerate the field, especially projects that are underserved by industry and academia;
parents who want to learn more about the possibilities for expanding fertility and for making genomic choices on behalf of their future children;
and curious thinkers.
Last year
We ran this event in 2025 for the first time with the goal of inaugurating a community oriented towards the genomic emancipation of humanity. There were over 100 attendees, and speakers included polygenic prediction researcher Prof. Steve Hsu, biotech pioneer Prof. George Church, and ethics and legal expert Prof. Henry Greely.
Attendees (n=27) rated:
How strongly they would recommend others attend the next summit at 8.8/10
The talks at 8/10 (see some of the talks here: youtube.com/@BerkeleyGenomicsProject)
The conversations at 8.9/10
What this is for
The basic idea of the summit is described on the homepage linked above. To add a few points:
Advanced reprotech and reprogenetics will likely be highly beneficial to humanity in the medium term, as they are developed and made widely accessible. Much of the important work is already underway by academics (genetics, IVG research, gene editing, sequencing, etc.) and a nascent industry (polygenic embryo screening, embryo editing). However, I think that the field suffers from a cold-start problem of circular dependencies, where funding, regulation, scientific progress, and the public conversation are mutually bottlenecked on each other. One of the strengths of the LW and EA communities is the ability to think things through, reach some conclusions about what is true and what is important somewhat ahead of the curve, and then put their money where their mouth is. For that reason, if you're motivated and ready to learn and work hard, there's lots of neglected stuff in this field that you could make a difference for.
This will be a great place to learn about what's starting to be available and what might be available in the near-term and mid-term future, if:
...you're interested in volunteering, supporting, or working in this field;
...you're interested in cutting-edge tech that you could apply for your own family;
...you're interested in investing in or philanthropically funding these ventures.
The field of advanced reprotech and reprogenetics is not for intelligence amplification, existential risk reduction, or anything about AGI. That is an important thing to keep in mind. The field is about children, and their parents and families and guardians, and technology for supporting them. It is too great an imposition for society, or a sector of society, to subjugate individual procreative autonomy and the consent of the unborn to its instrumental purposes. So, I think that what society should coordinate around is reprogenetics for the sake of the emancipation of future children, with the immediate stewardship of parents and the guidance of clinics and counselors. See "Genomic emancipation contra eugenics". An integral part of developing reprogenetics is thinking about potential perils involved, and addressing the substantive ones with preemptive actions and ongoing adaptation. All that said, as long as that coordinated intention is the central principle of the field of reprogenetics, I believe that putting my efforts into pursuing reprogenetics—governed by that central principle—for the purposes of giving humanity more brainpower is both moral (good to do, all things considered) and ethical (doesn't break rules, e.g. for myopically-consequentialist reasons, that one shouldn't break). Giving humanity more brainpower via reprogenetics would be immensely beneficial. Besides generally empowering humanity, which is good, I think it is a good way to decrease existential risk from AGI:
Increasing humanity's brainpower probably helps decrease AGI X-risk. See "HIA and X-risk part 1: Why it helps". There are reasons to worry that actually it would increase AGI X-risk. See "HIA and X-risk part 2: Why it hurts". More investigation would be worthwhile, but my current view is that it's good to accelerate human intelligence amplification.
I believe that reprogenetics is the only method for strong human intelligence amplification that we have very good reason to think can be made to work well at scale any time soon (like, a few decades). See "Overview of strong human intelligence amplification methods". (Some scattered subsequent investigations on signaling molecules and BCIs have not made me more optimistic about other approaches. I'd be eager for constructive critiques of that reasoning and hopeworthy possibilities for other strong HIA methods. For example, BCIs and/or neural transplantation could offer some hope.)
Many readers here will be thinking: Why care about this, given that AGI will come so soon? However:
The correct strategy in response to broad AGI timelines is a broad portfolio of many interventions, including ones that take a long time to pay off in decreased X-risk.
What's the long-term way to escape AGI X-risk? If we get a delay, or if AGI is fortunately difficult to create, what then? Strategically, we're back to square one. Conceptual research that can happen in stealth mode in academia under various covers will most likely proceed, leading to a rising tide of algorithmic and conceptual progress. Social regimes to suppress AGI capabilities advancement are a good pursuit but don't seem like permanent solutions to safekeep humanity's future. In fact, I don't know of any good long-term solutions. Humanity getting more brainpower is an investment in the possibility of humanity figuring things out in the long run.
I think that confident short timelines don't make that much sense, and I think that broad classes of arguments people make for confident short timelines aren't that compelling.
Even with very aggressive AGI timelines, pushing up the timeline of an intervention that only avoids existential ruin 30 or 40 or 50 years from now is still helpful. You still decrease X-risk by an amount proportional to the probability of X-ruin over the "skipped" duration; if you're saved 40 years from now rather than 45 years from now, you avoided the X-risk that is incurred over the course of those 5 years. (See "The benefit of intervening sooner", though some central background assumptions there have to be taken with a bunch of salt.)
However, to punctuate: If you're motivated by existential risk, then you should not work in this field until you have a conceptual separation between (1) "what the field of reprogenetics is for, as a collective project; what it should coordinate around in terms of actions, concrete aims, norms, regulations, principles, and relationships as part of society" (emancipation and empowerment of future children) on the one hand, and (2) "what I want out of accelerating reprogenetics" (e.g. humanity having more brainpower) on the other hand; and you are loyal to (1) over (2), as a participant in humanity.
How you can help
Ticket purchases help to pay for the venue. We accept donations with ticket purchases and we offer supporter-tier tickets.
Come participate with an open mind and heart, with calm and earnest hope for working together to make a wonderful future for humanity.
If an organization you know might be interested in sponsoring this event, reach out. Our tiers are here: reproductivefrontiers.org/sponsorships.
Spread the word. Invite your bio friends and entrepreneur friends and investment/philanthropy friends and aspiring parents.
Happy to answer questions here or by email: reprofro2026@reproductivefrontiers.org
Tags: Reprogenetics, World Optimization
Karma: 59 | Comments: 0 | Author: TsviBT
Top Comments
Linda Linsefors (6 karma):
I remember reading a claim that the steering subsystem notices how much of the white is visible in other peoples eyes.
The text probably didn't use the term "steering subsystem" (unless I got this from one of your posts), but that's how I remember interpreting it.
Cats have eye-based facial expression too. Squinting (half closed eyes) means relaxed and trusting. If a cat slow-blinks at you (closes their eyes all the way) that's means they like you.
MichaelDickens (5 karma):
In 1971, the FDA wrote:
Heretofore, the Food and Drug Administration has expressed the opinion in trade correspondence that glycine is generally recognized as safe for certain technical effects in human food when used in accordance with good manufacturing practice; however:
(1) Reports in scientific literature indicate that adverse effects were found in cases where high levels of glycine were administered in diets of experimental animals.
(2) Current usage information indicates that the daily dietary intake of glycine by humans may be substantially increasing due to changing use patterns in food technology.
Therefore, the Food and Drug Administration no longer regards glycine and its salts as generally recognized as safe for use in human food and all outstanding letters expressing sanction for such use are rescinded.
I know very little about glycine and the FDA is often overcautious, but at minimum I think if you are suggesting readers to supplement glycine then you should address the fact that the FDA rescinded its GRAS designation.
faul_sname (6 karma):
AI agents might not need to develop long-term drives of their own to perform well at long-term tasks, if they can use humans for that purpose. As a corollary, AI agents that do not have long-term drives of their own can still act in long-term coherent ways, if they inhabit a world with abundant, easy-to-hire human labor. If it's cheaper to hire a human to get a scaffolded AI system to stay on track towards achieving some goal than it is to automate that monitoring, then it probably makes sense to just use the human.
Concretely, consider an AI system tasked with "produce a plate with two strawberries on it which are identical down to the cellular level, then stop". This problem has a number of subproblems, and a number of ways you could approach each subproblem. More than literally zero percent of the problem is "decide which high-level approach to take" or "notice that an approach seems to have hit a wall and go back to the drawing board". But not much more than zero percent. Most of the work will look more like "evaluate the division plane of this newly-divided cell, and compare it against the predictive model, and iterate a few thousand times, and tweak the predictive model, and iterate that loop a few dozen times".
In such a scenario, going from "you need a human a couple times per trillion tokens" to "you never need a human" is just not a significant efficiency gain. The AI should just hire a human to watch, and, if it's worried about the loyalty of the human, build in checks to make sure that the human isn't sabotaging it in any obvious way. A human in that role would be important, but not at all powerful.
p.b. (5 karma):
Very interesting!
I started taking collagen half a year back and didn't notice improved sleep. But my sleep is also hard to improve upon. I had less joint pain, which I was taking it for, but could also be explained by regression to the mean.
The main effect I am pretty sure about is that my finger nails started growing like crazy.
Good to know there are other reasons it might be a good idea to keep taking it.
JennaS (6 karma):
A while ago, I looked into essential vs non essential amino acids. It turns out the data we have on this mostly comes from a guy doing elimination diet experiments on young male college students in the 1930s-50s. While the essential aminos remained essential on replication, the “non essential” ones are not actually ruled out as non essential. Many have been reclassified into “conditionally essential” based on certain disease, genetic, or stressor states.
But what I think would be interesting would be some kind of comprehensive model of all the tradeoffs among all the amino acids. Such as, which other aminos and other body resources does an amino synthesis consume; any byproducts made thereby; biological pathways clogged up by their cooption for synthesis; harmful and helpful body processes enabled by certain levels of a certain amino; and so on. Then you condition on various disease states, and expected changes for each state based on amino acid intake, and then you can have a whold Pareto frontier of amino acid intake profiles.
I wonder if a very rough draft of one could be put together with a week of directing LLMs to do research and model building. Seems like an interesting project!
ChristianKl (5 karma):
Bone broth soup seems to be a traditional home remedy for feverish colds and flu-like respiratory illness. This is true cross culturally and many different cultures seem to converged on it being a good treatment.
Traditional diets included collagen-rich connective tissue such as skin, tendons, cartilage, and bone broth, which is about 33% glycine.
It's 33% of the amino acids in collagen counting amino acids. It's less if you count them by weight/mass as glycine is lighter than other amino acids. Connective tissue also contains a lot besides collagen, so 33% is overcounting it on that front as well.
Estimated total requirements range from 10 to 60 grams per day depending on health status
That sentence sounds like different people estimated the requirement with some saying you need 10 gram and others say you need 60 gram. Your link mainly seems to show that there's one blogger who thinks that the needs are in that range.
When trying to reproduce the 10 gram number myself, I get the impression it counts the total need of glycine in a normal state for bodily processes against dietary consumption while ignoring the amount of glycine that gets freed by the breakdown of the body own proteins including collagen. A lot of collagen production is collagen turnover where old collagen (sometimes damaged by AGEs) gets replaced with fresh new collagen where the individual glycine can in principle be reused.
This is not comprehensive nutritional advice. For instance, cysteine is the other bottleneck for glutathione production, and people who eat little animal protein or are acutely ill may benefit from supplementing NAC (N-acetylcysteine) alongside glycine.
In some cases that might be beneficial but NAC supplementation can decrease muscle hypertrophy, so supplementing NAC per default when not ill probably only should be done when it's well-thought out and not just by random supplement consumption.