{"id":209372,"date":"2025-10-18T18:26:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-18T18:26:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/209372\/"},"modified":"2025-10-18T18:26:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-18T18:26:12","slug":"the-rise-of-consumer-eugenics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/209372\/","title":{"rendered":"The rise of consumer eugenics"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a recent interview<\/a> with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, Noor Siddiqui, founder of the Silicon Valley start-up Orchid, described her company\u2019s mission in glowing terms: giving parents \u201cthe power to protect their children before pregnancy begins.\u201d By sequencing 99 percent of an embryo\u2019s 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\u2014long before a child is ever born. <\/p>\n

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<\/a> and is now accelerating toward a world where human life is manufactured, optimized, and discarded. <\/p>\n

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<\/a> as the dawn of \u201cpersonalized medicine.\u201d 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. <\/p>\n

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). <\/p>\n

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 \u201cscorecard,\u201d to decide which embryo to implant. <\/p>\n

Orchid\u2019s pitch is not simply about avoiding rare and deadly disorders; it is about minimizing future suffering. As Siddiqui puts it, \u201cThis is the most significant way that I\u2019m going to be able to shape my child\u2019s health.\u201d In her telling, it is an act of \u201cmaximum\u201d love and care, akin to choosing the best nursery, schools, or childcare. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to see how this would appeal to many parents. Who doesn\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n

As Ari Schulman, editor of the New Atlantis, noted on X<\/a>, \u201cCancer screening prevents disease by helping the patient live. Embryo screening prevents disease by killing the patient.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\tIf the last 30 years of genetic science have shown us anything, it is that our technical abilities often outrun our moral wisdom.<\/p>\n

Siddiqui recounts her mother\u2019s slow blindness from retinitis pigmentosa as the personal motivation for Orchid. Her condition, while not life-threatening, altered their family\u2019s 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\u2014sadly\u2014wouldn\u2019t be here. The moral line between treating sick children and destroying human embryos before they have a chance at life is stark.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Siddiqui herself acknowledges that rare genetic diseases often receive little research funding because the patient population is \u201ctoo small\u201d to attract pharmaceutical investment. Orchid\u2019s model accepts this stagnation as inevitable, offering embryo selection as the \u201cmore affordable\u201d alternative to finding cures.<\/p>\n

While Siddiqui is confident in the accuracy of Orchid\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

A federal class action lawsuit<\/a> filed this year against Luminary Genetics alleges that the test routinely mislabels human embryos, leading to the unnecessary destruction of viable ones. Studies cited<\/a> 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 \u201cabnormal\u201d were often normal upon retesting.<\/p>\n

Yet PGT-A is now used in roughly 40 percent<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a recent interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, Noor Siddiqui, founder of the Silicon Valley…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":209373,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[1319,4965,916,12716,90,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-209372","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-genetics","8":"tag-consumer","9":"tag-eugenics","10":"tag-genetics","11":"tag-rise","12":"tag-science","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209372\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/209373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}