The rise of consumer eugenics

In a recent interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, Noor Siddiqui, founder of the Silicon Valley start-up Orchid, described her company’s mission in glowing terms: giving parents “the power to protect their children before pregnancy begins.” By sequencing 99 percent of an embryo’s genome, Orchid claims it can screen for over a thousand single-gene disorders, a dozen polygenic conditions like schizophrenia or heart disease, and a host of other traits—long before a child is ever born.

It sounds like a triumph of modern science. In reality, it is the latest, and perhaps most seductive, rise in consumer eugenics. Technological innovation that began with the Human Genome Project and is now accelerating toward a world where human life is manufactured, optimized, and discarded.

When the Human Genome Project began in 1990, its stated aim was to map the entirety of human DNA, unlocking the mysteries of genetic diseases and paving the way for life-saving treatments. By 2003, it had succeeded; an achievement hailed by some as the dawn of “personalized medicine.” What followed, however, was not merely a medical revolution but the birth of an industry that treats human genetic code as raw material for selection.

Companies like Orchid, Genomic Prediction, and MyOme are the direct descendants of this effort. Using advances in genetic sequencing, cloud computing, and machine learning, they now apply the tools of genome science to human embryos created through in vitro fertilization (IVF).

The process, as Siddiqui describes it, is relatively straightforward: Create multiple embryos in a lab, biopsy a handful of cells from each, and test these cells for chromosomal, monogenic, and polygenic conditions. From there, Orchid generates a risk score and profile for conditions ranging from cystic fibrosis and diabetes to bipolar disorder. Parents receive a report, which is effectively a genetic “scorecard,” to decide which embryo to implant.

Orchid’s pitch is not simply about avoiding rare and deadly disorders; it is about minimizing future suffering. As Siddiqui puts it, “This is the most significant way that I’m going to be able to shape my child’s health.” In her telling, it is an act of “maximum” love and care, akin to choosing the best nursery, schools, or childcare.

It’s easy to see how this would appeal to many parents. Who doesn’t want a healthy child? But Orchid, and companies like it, take this natural desire and offer a destructive technological solution: Choose which human embryos live and which ones die.

As Ari Schulman, editor of the New Atlantis, noted on X, “Cancer screening prevents disease by helping the patient live. Embryo screening prevents disease by killing the patient.”

Siddiqui recounts her mother’s slow blindness from retinitis pigmentosa as the personal motivation for Orchid. Her condition, while not life-threatening, altered their family’s life and left a lasting impact on her. Her solution, however, defies logic. If her grandparents had relied on this screening for her mother, Noor—sadly—wouldn’t be here. The moral line between treating sick children and destroying human embryos before they have a chance at life is stark.

Likewise, embryonic screening discourages genuine medical innovation. When the goal shifts from curing disease in existing patients to preventing undesirable patients from being born at all, the incentive to develop treatments declines.

Siddiqui herself acknowledges that rare genetic diseases often receive little research funding because the patient population is “too small” to attract pharmaceutical investment. Orchid’s model accepts this stagnation as inevitable, offering embryo selection as the “more affordable” alternative to finding cures.

While Siddiqui is confident in the accuracy of Orchid’s tests, the expansion of preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) over the last two decades shows how quickly screening technologies can become standard, even when their tests are unreliable.

A federal class action lawsuit filed this year against Luminary Genetics alleges that the test routinely mislabels human embryos, leading to the unnecessary destruction of viable ones. Studies cited in the case found no improvement in live birth rates from PGT-A, a false positive rate over 50 percent, and evidence that embryos marked “abnormal” were often normal upon retesting.

Yet PGT-A is now used in roughly 40 percent of U.S. IVF cycles. Its popularity owes less to proven medical benefit than to the cultural momentum of technological control. The more we think we can know, the more we feel obliged to choose.

Orchid represents the next leap where parents move from targeted chromosomal checks to full-genome analysis. This is only possible because the cost of sequencing has plummeted since the Human Genome Project, from billions of dollars to a few thousand. At $2,500 per embryo, what began as a public research initiative is now a consumer service priced like a high-end smartphone.

If the last 30 years of genetic science have shown us anything, it is that our technical abilities often outrun our moral wisdom. The Human Genome Project gave us the ability to read the genetic story of life. Companies like Orchid now offer to edit the cast list as the story begins.