[Noor Siddiqui’s] company, San Francisco-based Orchid Health, screens embryos for thousands of potential future illnesses, letting prospective parents plan their families with far more information about their progeny than ever before.
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Orchid represents a slice of a broader cultural movement in which powerful people in Washington and Silicon Valley are pushing the importance of producing offspring. Vice President JD Vance, Musk and Siddiqui’s early benefactor, the conservative billionaire investor Peter Thiel, have all repeatedly argued that falling birth rates threaten the future of industrialized nations …
But Orchid doesn’t just help people have children; it helps them shape their future children in dramatically new ways. And that has sparked controversy. Some critics see its polygenic scoring as veering toward a contemporary form of eugenics …
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In the United States, there are virtually no restrictions on the types of genetic predictions companies can offer, and no external vetting of their proprietary scoring methods.
