Inside Silicon Valley’s push to breed super-babies

Summary

Brief Overview

This episode of Post Reports explores Silicon Valley’s rapidly expanding efforts to “optimize” babies through advanced genetic testing of embryos. Host Elahe Izadi and Silicon Valley correspondent Lizza Dwoskin dive into the world of startups like Orchid Health, which promise not just to screen for genetic diseases but to make predictions about a child's future health, sparking excitement, skepticism, and deep ethical debate. The conversation weaves through stories from families who’ve used these technologies, the evolving science, accuracy concerns, and the looming specter of eugenics.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction to Embryo Genetic Optimization (00:02–02:29)

• Orchid Health and Their Mission: Startups like Orchid offer advanced embryo genetic testing, positioning their technology as a step toward a future where all babies are "optimized" for health.
• Use of promotional videos to illustrate how families use these services.
• Genetic counselors guide parents through selecting embryos for IVF based on comprehensive reports.

“We went online and looked at all the results and then selected an embryo for implantation.”
— Parent in Orchid video promo (00:36)

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2. What Makes Orchid Different? (03:38–05:34)

• Personal Motivation: Noor Siddiqui, Orchid’s founder, was motivated by her mother’s experience with a hereditary eye disease.
• Beyond Standard Testing: Orchid claims to sequence the whole genome from just five embryo cells, testing for 1,000+ rare diseases and making "polygenic predictions"—assessments of a person’s future risk of diseases like Alzheimer’s, obesity, or diabetes.
• Comparison to Routine IVF Screening: While genetic screening to avoid immediate fatal diseases is common, Orchid markets a much broader, more predictive scope.

“They're offering...over 1,000 possible rare diseases that a baby could be born with that they'll screen for.”
— Lizza Dwoskin (04:29)

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3. Understanding Polygenic Prediction (05:34–06:52)

• The Science: Polygenic scoring aggregates genetic information from population biobanks (e.g., UK Biobank) to estimate disease risks based on gene clusters, but only in terms of probability, not certainty.
• Limitations: These scores show likelihood but do not make deterministic predictions.

“No one's saying you are going to get cancer if you have this particular constellation of genes.”
— Lizza Dwoskin (06:52)

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4. User Experience and Access (07:03–10:43)

• Cost & Process: $2,500 per embryo; typically all embryos are screened for comparative selection.
• Reports & Decisions: Prospective parents receive detailed printouts for each embryo, comparing disease propensities.
• User Story – Roshan & Julie: San Francisco tech workers used Orchid to avoid passing on a rare hearing loss gene—polygenic scores served as a "tiebreaker" between otherwise similar embryos.

“We have six embryos. But two...very likely...will be born deaf, two are carriers...and two are completely unaffected.”
— Roshan George (10:13)

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5. Accuracy and Scientific Concerns (13:25–15:56)

• Inconsistency Among Companies: Different startups give different risk predictions for the same embryos, suggesting unready technology.
• Algorithm Opacity: Each company has its own algorithms, none transparent or peer-reviewed.
• Sample Limitations: Most biobank data comes from people of European descent, reducing reliability for others.
• Questionable Methods: Scientists question the reliability of sequencing a full genome from five cells; Orchid’s only supporting paper is unpublished in detail and non-replicable.

“No one has been able to replicate the method or see how they actually do it. And a number of scientists told me that was cause for concern.”
— Lizza Dwoskin (15:56)

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6. Ethical Dilemmas and Social Implications (16:09–20:40)

• Where Is the Line?: Most surveyed Americans are fine with disease screening but uncomfortable with trait selection (e.g., height, intelligence).
• Slippery Slope to Eugenics?: Host and guest discuss fears around reintroducing eugenics—a word with dark historical connotations—via technology.
• Equity Questions: Currently, only the wealthy can access these technologies, raising concerns about deepening social inequality—“designer babies by spreadsheet.”
• Genetic Complexity: Screening for some diseases may inadvertently “screen out” positive or neutral traits due to genes clustering together (pleiotropy).

“It also could just be that a lot of these wealthy people who are doing this are getting a little bit duped because polygenic scores for intelligence aren’t that good right now.”
— Lizza Dwoskin (17:49)

“If they had screened for [the mother’s eye disease], her mother wouldn’t have been born, and [Noor] wouldn’t have been born, and this company wouldn’t have existed.”
— Elahe Izadi (19:35)

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7. Silicon Valley’s Motivations and the Road Ahead (20:40–23:13)

• The Ideology: Tech leaders see themselves as shaping the future. They argue for individual choice and the “democratization” of genetic knowledge, but acknowledge this frontier is deeply fraught.
• Normalization is Inevitable?: Lizza predicts broader adoption as the technology matures and prices drop, though not without controversy.
• Direct Eugenics Links: While Orchid refutes association with eugenics, they’ve platformed eugenicist academics (later removed after journalistic inquiry).
• Open Questions: Should biological advantage be added to the toolkit of the already privileged?

“Should we make [society] even more unequal with biology?...But the fact is this is already happening and people are already doing this.”
— Lizza Dwoskin (22:42)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Selection:
  “Families are literally...choosing the babies by spreadsheet.”
  — Unidentified Expert/Scientist (08:57)

• On Consumer Motivations:
  “Mostly they wanted to know that the baby didn’t have the hearing loss gene...the baby was born healthfully and does not have hearing loss.”
  — Lizza Dwoskin (10:36, 10:43)

• On Scientific Transparency:
  “Orchid says [their methods] are proprietary, but the effect is that no one has been able to replicate the method.”
  — Lizza Dwoskin (15:48)

• On Ethical Uncertainty:
  “A lot of these wealthy people who are doing this are getting a little bit duped...you might not be getting much at all for your money.”
  — Lizza Dwoskin (17:49)

• On Future Implications:
  “Society is already unequal with trust funds. Should we make it even more unequal with biology?”
  — Lizza Dwoskin (22:42)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:02–02:29: Setting up the story: introduction to embryo genetic screening and Orchid Health
• 03:38–05:34: Noor Siddiqui’s personal motivation and Orchid’s unique approach
• 05:34–06:52: Explanation of polygenic scores and what they can/can’t predict
• 07:03–10:43: How consumers use Orchid, costs involved, user experience (Roshan & Julie’s story)
• 13:25–15:56: Concerns about the accuracy and consistency of these technologies
• 16:09–18:51: Societal unease: eugenics, trait selection, and regulatory gaps
• 19:35–20:40: What do we lose by screening out embryos? The complexity of genetic tradeoffs
• 20:40–23:13: Silicon Valley’s broader motivations and the looming question of inequality

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Conclusion

This episode pulls back the curtain on the drive to apply optimization logic to human reproduction, revealing both the promise and the perils. It highlights the collision between Silicon Valley futurism, scientific uncertainty, and haunting social questions, leaving listeners with more questions about where society draws the line between “healthier babies” and a new form of engineered inequality.

Transcript

[Elahe Izadi]

Silicon Valley is on a quest to optimize babies. This is baby Jaffe.

[Unidentified Parent]

Oh, my goodness. So what has the first couple of months been like?

[Elahe Izadi]

This is from a promotional video for a company called Orchid Health. It offers advanced genetic testing for embryos. In the video, mom Leah leans over a baby in a bouncy chair. Leah describes how Orchid helped her and her husband create Baby Baby Jaffe. They tested their embryos, talked to a genetic counselor.

[Lizza Dwoskin]

We actually talked with one of the.

[Unidentified Parent]

Genetic counselors with Orchid.

[Lizza Dwoskin]

We went online and looked at all the results and then selected an embryo for implantation.

[Elahe Izadi]

So, as you would, you were once.

[Lizza Dwoskin]

An embryo, but for us, the embryo test.

[Elahe Izadi]

Lizza Dwoskin is the Post Silicon Valley correspondent. She's been reporting on startups like Orchid that are getting into the fertility game.

[Lizza Dwoskin]

Orchid Health is a company here in San Francisco that's part of this growing crop of startups that are offering what I would call a brave new world of genetic predictions.

[Elahe Izadi]

These companies screen embryos for health issues, but they're not just looking for health issues now. They're trying to predict ones that could develop decades after a baby is born, once they've grown into an adult, issues like cancer or Alzheimer's. Here's Noor Siddiqui, the founder and CEO of Orchid Health, speaking in that promo video. She says babies like Jaffe are just the beginning.

[Unidentified Parent]

This baby like, represents the future of, like, how all babies will be created, hopefully.

[Elahe Izadi]

From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports.

[Eli (Producer/Host)]

Eli.

[Elahe Izadi]

I'm Elahe izadi. It's Tuesday, October 14th. Today, Inside Silicon Valley's push to breed super babies, Liza explains how companies are investing in technology they view as a medical miracle that will reduce future suffering. And we get into the thorny ethical questions this is raising. Hi, Liza. Thanks so much for making time to talk with me today.

[Lizza Dwoskin]

Thanks for having me on.

[Elahe Izadi]

So I'm really excited to dive into this reporting that you and your colleagues have been doing. To start, why did you decide to profile Noor and her company, Orchid Health?

[Unidentified Expert/Scientist]

Well, I got interested in this because I'm a mom of two and I've gone on my own fertility journeys, and I've experienced the anxiety and sometimes the agony of just, you know, waiting for the results of a genetic test about your baby. And then I discovered this sort of whole world of fertility hacking. And there's a lot of investor money going towards financing companies that extend or improve fertility. Right now, companies like Orchid are focusing specifically on what you'd say optimizing the baby Using genetic selection and advanced genetic testing to basically help families who are implanting embryos through IVF choose the healthiest embryo, the embryo that's least likely to.

[Lizza Dwoskin]

Be affected by disease.

[Elahe Izadi]

That is so fascinating. And I want to dig into that in a little bit, but before we get there, how did Noor come up with the idea of Orchid health?

[Lizza Dwoskin]

What she says is that her mom was born with this debilitating genetic eye disease called retinous pigmentosa that essentially made her effectively blind. She couldn't see. And she said, if we had had better genetic screening back when my mom was born, well, we could have chosen a different embryo that wouldn't have had the eye disease. She had this family trauma around her mom, and she wanted to do something to solve that.

[Elahe Izadi]

Okay, so this is personal for Nour, but I want to understand how the genetic screening that Orchid is doing is different from what's commonplace already. Like, certain genetic tests are already standard during pregnancy, and people do some of this with IVF in vitro fertilization. So how is what ORCID is delivering different from what's already out there?

[Lizza Dwoskin]

Yes, many people who do IVF will also have the embryos go through a genetic screening because some of these mutations can actually cause a failed pregnancy. So you'd want to do a genetic screening to also help the health of the pregnancy and the success of the pregnancy. But what NEUR and Orchid are offering is sort of eons beyond what your standard IVF clinic is offering. They're offering, I think, over 1,000 possible rare diseases that a baby could be born with that they'll screen for. They take just five cell from an embryo, and through those just five cells, they make a full sequence of the genome. And then they look at the health of the genome, whether it has genetic mutations or chromosomal abnormalities or clusters of genes that point to diseases. And this could be a tragic disease that the baby is born with from the moment of birth. Or they are also making what are called polygenic predictions about diseases that these babies could develop when they're adults later in life, like Alzheimer's or obesity or diabetes.

[Elahe Izadi]

Okay, that was a lot of science, so let's just unpack this a bit. So not only are companies like Orchid doing a sort of souped up genetic testing on an embryo to see if anything genetically could be wrong now, but they're also making predictions about an embryo's future health, called polygenic predictions.

[Eli (Producer/Host)]

Right.

[Elahe Izadi]

How does that work?

[Unidentified Expert/Scientist]

Polygenic scoring is this really interesting and emerging area of science, which is around making predictions for the diseases of a population based on their genetics. And what you have in various countries around the world, particularly in the UK and in Europe, you have what are called biobanks. And these are repositories of genetic data where adults like you and me could go, say, I volunteer. Maybe I'll get paid some money to have my genome sequenced for the purposes of science. And now they can look at those.

[Lizza Dwoskin]

People'S diseases, who got heart disease, who.

[Unidentified Expert/Scientist]

Got schizophrenia, who developed obesity, and they can say, are there any correlations between the genes of these people who got these diseases? And it turns out that there are clusters of genes that they've identified in large populations that seem to be predictive of disease.

[Lizza Dwoskin]

So, again, these are predictions. It's just about the likelihood. No one's saying you are going to get cancer if you have this particular constellation of genes.

[Elahe Izadi]

And then if you're a prospective parent. How does this work? Like, let's say it is being offered in the clinic that you are going to. How much does it cost? What do you have to do?

[Lizza Dwoskin]

It costs $2,500 per embryo you screen. And obviously, most families want to screen all their embryos because the point is to compare one embryo against one another to pick the healthiest.

[Unidentified Expert/Scientist]

And the way that these couples are getting embryos is just through the process of going through IVF or in vitro fertilization, where you go to an IVF clinic, one partner gives their sperm, or there's a donor sperm, and then embryos are created in a petri dish. So when I was reporting the story, you know, families would show me their embryo reports, basically where they would look at the genetic results of different embryos and kind of compare them side by side. And even Noor Siddiqui did it herself with her own embryos that she screened on a promotional video on Orchid's website.

[Unidentified Parent]

So these are my actual embryos. I ended up getting, I think, something like 20, 21 eggs. And then from those 21 eggs, we got 16 embryos. So I think I'm going to show you those 16 embryos right now.

[Unidentified Expert/Scientist]

So what you get essentially is a printout for each embryo that you screened. And you can basically compare those embryos side by side.

[Unidentified Parent]

You can compare embryo two to embryo three and say, okay, look, fortunately, we just avoided risk for hundreds of diseases that otherwise you wouldn't have been able to detect until after the baby was born. Again, we're looking at embryo. This is before.

[Unidentified Expert/Scientist]

And so there, you know, you're looking many years into the future. It's a Percentage score.

[Unidentified Parent]

But for breast cancer, you see a delta of, you know, this embryo is close to the population average risk of about 14% lifetime risk compared to this embryo, which is very elevated. So it's a 37% lifetime risk.

[Unidentified Expert/Scientist]

And when families are weighing this side by side, they're literally like choosing the babies by spreadsheet in a certain sense.

[Elahe Izadi]

You know, Liza, we've been talking a lot about just the technology itself. But did you talk with anyone who has used Orchid as a service and what was their experience like?

[Lizza Dwoskin]

Yeah, so all the people I spoke to who used these services had something in common. Not only that they had means, but also that they had rare diseases in their family that they didn't want to pass on to their children. And it wouldn't have been caught by a regular embryo screening. So they wanted more advanced screening. One of the people I spoke with was Roshan George and his wife Julie. They live in San Francisco. They work in tech.

[Roshan George]

We had a little bit of interest in this stuff, so it seemed like a pretty good idea and then we went ahead with it.

[Lizza Dwoskin]

They found that they were carriers for this pretty rare genetic mutation that can cause hearing loss in a baby. And they found it was too complicated through their actual their regular IVF clinic to see whether their embryos were carriers of that genetic mutation. So they went to Orcid and they actually screened six embryos.

[Roshan George]

And the end result is we have six embryos. But two of those embryos are completely affected, like, very likely that they will be born deaf, and two are carriers, just like me and Julie, and two are completely unaffected.

[Unidentified Expert/Scientist]

And he said that the polygenic score was the tiebreaker for them. It really pushed them over to the edge of saying, okay, well, this one's.

[Lizza Dwoskin]

Like, even going to be slightly healthier.

[Unidentified Expert/Scientist]

In the future than the other one. But mostly they wanted to know that the baby didn't have the hearing loss gene.

[Lizza Dwoskin]

And they were very satisfied customers. The baby was born healthfully and does not have hearing loss.

[Elahe Izadi]

After the break, how well these predictions work and why this technology is leaving critics uneasy. We'll be right back.

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[Elahe Izadi]

So Lizza, we've been talking about the promise of these new forms of early genetic testing, but I wanted to now just kick the tires a little bit on this technology. What do we know about the accuracy of these tests?

[Lizza Dwoskin]

I got very different impressions about the accuracy from different experts and scientists around polygenic scoring. If you even look at the difference between the different companies, the few startups that offer this type of scoring, the scores that they offer for embryos are quite different. Depending on the company you go to, you might get pretty different scores. That in itself suggests to me that this stuff may not be ready for prime time. Each company is going to have its own secret sauce, its own algorithms, and those algorithms are based on the latest scientific research. Nonetheless, how you make your proprietary algorithm is different for each company, and the results can be quite different. And then the weight that environmental factors have in getting a disease, that's a big unknown. You know, even though we're learning more about genes, environmental factors stress all epigenetics, it's called, all that. That stuff can actually affect whether a gene or gene mutation expresses itself or not.

[Unidentified Expert/Scientist]

The other issue, besides not knowing how the environment is going to impact how genes express themselves, is this issue of bias. Most people who have given their genes up, volunteered their genes to biobanks are American or European. And so if you're of Asian, African, or Middle Eastern descent, the accuracy of a polygenic score is going to be much, much lower.

[Elahe Izadi]

That's really fascinating. And also, Lizza, one thing that really stuck out to me when you were talking about orchids specifically, you said this earlier, that they can just take five cells from each embryo and run their testing on those five cells. What is the reliability of that method?

[Lizza Dwoskin]

Yeah, One of the findings in our story was just that a number of scientists really question whether the full genome can be accurately sequenced from just five cells from an embryo.

[Elahe Izadi]

What is orcid, or Nur Siddiqi said in response to that.

[Lizza Dwoskin]

Well, they've said that they can accurately do so, but they've only published one.

[Unidentified Expert/Scientist]

Major paper on this.

[Lizza Dwoskin]

They call it their breakthrough paper, and.

[Unidentified Expert/Scientist]

They put it out in 2022. But the paper does not include the.

[Lizza Dwoskin]

Methodology that they use for sequencing. Now, Orcid says that's because the information.

[Unidentified Expert/Scientist]

Is proprietary, but the effect is that.

[Lizza Dwoskin]

No one has been able to replicate the method or see how they actually do it. And a number of scientists told me that was cause for concern. Even some scientists who are believers in the service said that was a red flag.

[Elahe Izadi]

So, Liza, I would imagine some people listening to this, you know, we've touched on it a little bit, would be really concerned about the ethics of all of this. Like, it's one thing to screen an embryo for a disease that would basically render that pregnancy, you know, unable to come to term versus, you know, screening embryos for potential future diseases. It's almost like, are people picking and choosing to essentially breed super babies? I feel like that is something that may feel a little icky about this whole conversation.

[Lizza Dwoskin]

Well, I think it also depends on.

[Unidentified Expert/Scientist]

What you're screening for. You know, there's been some studies. There was one last year from Harvard Medical School, which actually found that it was a survey, and most Americans who were surveyed said that they were comfortable with the idea of advanced genetic screening when it came to disease, but they were less comfortable with the idea of doing these kinds of screenings for what we would call phenotypes or traits like height or eye color or intelligence. And by the way, there's no regulation whatsoever in the United States about what you can test for or what you can claim you can test for within ivf.

[Elahe Izadi]

Okay, let's talk about that. Because selecting for certain traits like height and eye color, that makes a lot of people uncomfortable, I think, because it raises the specter of eugenics. That's basically the idea of breeding superior humans, and they're considered superior because there are certain racial or ethnic or physical traits that would be considered inferior. So what is this genetic screening really about?

[Lizza Dwoskin]

There's sort of this whole debate in this world over whether genetic screening is about creating healthier babies or creating babies that are healthier than everyone else and maybe smarter than everyone else and maybe better looking than everyone else. I think the best way to ask that question is to say, who gets to do this? Like, how would you feel if everybody had the ability to select for their baby's height or their baby's intelligence? I think that core question is right. If it was available to everybody, if everybody could pick intelligence or height, maybe that would feel more equal and less icky, less unethical. But the fact is, right now, these services are only available to a really small number of people. So then you start getting, yes, into this, this race of who gets to make the smarter babies. But it also could just be that a lot of these wealthy people who are doing this are getting a little bit duped because polygenic scores for intelligence aren't that good right now. I think they can only predict a handful of IQ points. So you might be doing this whole thing just for a handful of IQ points. You might not be getting much at all for your money.

[Elahe Izadi]

You know, on some level, I get that, like, couples who are going through IVF because they're having fertility issues is very fraught. It's very difficult. And this is just like, such a personal decision and situation. And I would understand why someone would want every tool at their disposal to have the best outcome, especially if you don't have many chances. But at the same time, are there any considerations as to what could be lost by screening out embryos in this way? Like, I'm even thinking about the story that inspired Noor to go down this path about her mother. Like, if they had screened for that, her mother wouldn't have been born, and she wouldn't have been born, and this company wouldn't have existed.

[Lizza Dwoskin]

Yeah, exactly. So there's this other scientific issue that is actively being researched right now. There's this concept called pleiotropy, which essentially talks about how certain genes cluster together. And so if you, let's say, choose an embryo that might have a high likelihood of schizophrenia, you might be screening out something like creativity. Again, that's not proven, but there is some scientific research about certain clusters of genes that produce traits that have nothing to do with one another. I think one was genes that are correlated with heart disease can also be correlated with your taste buds and your ability to taste. So in theory, if you were screening out a baby with a high genetic propensity for heart disease, you might actually be screening out some of their ability to taste. Again, this research is really in process, and a lot is unknown. But that's one of the arguments that some scientists say, why these tests shouldn't be commercialized. Because there's just so much we don't know about how genes interact and how they function and how they produce outcomes in our lives.

[Elahe Izadi]

You know, Liza, as someone who has covered Silicon Valley for so long, and as you dug into not just this company, Orchid, just Emerging Fertility Technologies, where does this all leave you on the question of what is kind of the next step on how Silicon Valley is shaping our reality?

[Lizza Dwoskin]

One of the reasons that I enjoy covering Silicon Valley after all these years is because I do think it is useful to get in the heads of the people who are, quote, unquote, building the future. And in many ways, they are. One of the interesting things that I learned from the story was just how fast genetic knowledge is changing, which is why I came to believe that a lot more genetic testing is going to be available in IVF clinics in the near future, that a lot of this is going to trickle down. It's not democratic now, but it could trickle down. Another takeaway for me was around this question of eugenics. Eugenics is a really, really charged word because of its association with Nazism and government programs to try to weed out people like Jewish people and others with, quote, unquote, inferior genes. What they saw were inferior genes. But what a lot of the people in Silicon Valley are trying to do, who are proponents of this, is take the word eugenics out of the equation and go into this question of individual choice. If scientific knowledge is available, why shouldn't people be able to use it to make healthier and smarter babies. And if you already are a wealthy person who has the right to give your child a trust fund or put your child in an elite private school, shouldn't you also have the right to use the latest scientific knowledge to improve your child's health or their outcomes in life? Now, when it comes to Orcid, they refute any association with eugenics, but they.

[Unidentified Expert/Scientist]

Did have an interview with an academic.

[Lizza Dwoskin]

Who has promoted eugenics on their website, and they only took it down once I asked them about it. So there's that, too. But you know, I think if you put aside the charged term eugenics for.

[Unidentified Expert/Scientist]

A second, there's actually a deeper and.

[Lizza Dwoskin]

More interesting question to wrestle with here. And I think a lot of people will listen to this and say, well, yeah, that's why should we exacerbate inequality? Society is already unequal with trust funds. Should we make it even more unequal with biology? And that's a huge conversation to have. But, but the fact is this is already happening and people are already doing this. So let's see what they're doing. Let's get in their heads and let's explore the moral questions and the societal questions around it.

[Elahe Izadi]

Lizza, thank you so much for joining and sharing your reporting.

[Lizza Dwoskin]

Thanks so much for having me.

[Elahe Izadi]

Lizza Dwoskin is the the Silicon Valley reporter for the Post. That's it for Post Reports. Thanks for listening. If you love the show, help other people discover it by leaving a rating on Spotify or a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Today's show was produced by Laura Benshoff with help from Arjun Singh. It was mixed by Sam Baer and edited by Ariel Plotnick. Thanks to James Graff. I'm Elahei Izadi. We'll be back tomorrow with more stories from the Washington Post.

[Eli (Producer/Host)]

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