This Woman Will Decide Which Babies Are Born

God help the babies! Or, absent God, a fertility startup called Orchid. It offers prospective parents a fantastical choice: Have a regular baby or have an Orchid baby. A regular baby might grow up and get cancer. Or be born with a severe intellectual disability. Or go blind. Or become obese. A regular baby might not even make it to childbirth. Any of those things could still happen to an Orchid baby, yes, but the risk, says 29-year-old Noor Siddiqui, plummets if you choose her method. It’s often called “genetic enhancement.”

Whenever I bring up Orchid in polite company, people squirm. “I’m uncomfortable,” they say. “Not for me.” “So unnatural.” Inevitably, Nazis get mentioned, as does a related word that starts with “eu” and ends in “genics.” (Orchid prefers I not utter it.) One new mom I was talking to was particularly, head-shakingly disturbed. Then, a few minutes later, in an attempt to change the subject, she announced to the room that she’d just fed her six-month-old his first peanut, and that in three months’ time she’d be feeding him his first shrimp, because that’s what the science says she must do to protect him from developing allergies.

Which is, of course, the entirety of Siddiqui’s pitch: to—based on what the science says—protect future people from future suffering. It’s why, as a teenage Thiel Fellow, Siddiqui launched a medical startup; and why, at 25, she started Orchid. It’s also why, now that the company’s gene-enhancing product is available, she wanted to be one of its first customers.

Siddiqui and her husband are perfectly fertile, but for this kind of intervention to work, you need embryos. So in 2022, Siddiqui underwent IVF at Stanford, wound up with 16 contenders, and sent off representative slivers to Orchid’s lab in North Carolina. Typically, preimplantation testing only scans for alarming abnormalities, and then a doctor selects the nicest looker. This is not that. This is something that, as Siddiqui tells me, “has been on society’s mind—sci-fi’s mind—for a generation”: a first-of-its-kind picture of every baby-to-be’s genetic destiny. Right now, Orchid calculates each embryo’s likelihood of one day suffering from any number of the more than 1,200 diseases and conditions about which we currently have (anywhere from rock-solid to, ya know, vague and extrapolative) genetic information. Who knows what it will calculate in the future.

Orchid is still in its early days—16 employees, $12 million in funding. But already, they’re in 40 IVF clinics across the country and have thousands of customers. This includes, I’m told, several big-name figures in tech. Asked to betray their identities, Siddiqui scoffs, but she’s more than happy to show me the data on her own embryos. This she does on a picture-perfect day outside a coffee shop near her home in the Mission district of San Francisco. The report, which she pulls up on her laptop, is sleekly designed, with all sorts of charts and numbers, some in black (solid odds against schizophrenia), others in red (not so good for breast cancer). If it were up to Siddiqui, a Stanford-trained computer scientist, that’s all we’d talk about—the percentages, the percentiles, the “penetrances.” But I keep trying to pull her away from the numbers, from what the science (she claims) says. Because that’s not the whole story. Because, as she said herself, this is a science fiction story too …

Jason Kehe: Before we get to your embryos, I just learned that you have a new podcast—not just about Orchid but about all kinds of crazy science and future-y stuff. Should I be listening to it?