Should Human Life be Optimized?

Orchid is an organization that focuses on screening embryos’ DNA for hundreds of conditions, such as retinitis pigmentosa, which can be traced to a single genetic variant. But the company also goes further, offering what is known as polygenic screening, which gives parents what is essentially a risk profile on each embryo’s propensity for conditions such as heart disease, for which the genetic component is far more complex.

Today it is an expensive procedure offered to patients undergoing I.V.F., who are often but not always infertile couples seeking treatment. But Ms. Siddiqui — and others in Silicon Valley, where investors in and users of this technology abound — envision such comprehensive screening eventually replacing the old-fashioned way of having children altogether. “Sex is for fun, and embryo screening is for babies,” she said in a video she shared on X. “It’s going to become insane not to screen for these things.”

“These things” presumably refers to conditions like obesity and autism, both of which Orchid says it can screen for. What she and others who run screening companies tend to talk about even less is that such things could also include traits like intellectual ability and height.

In the United States, despite more than $1 billion invested in fertility-focused start-ups in the past decade, there is remarkably little regulation or even basic public scrutiny of what practices are acceptable. Instead, venture capital and private equity firms have spurred the creation of technologies and innovations in the field, with no mechanism in place for oversight.

Today the United States is known for its wide range of available services, which include sex selection and even eye color choice, as well as polygenic embryo screening, and has become a destination for fertility patients from around the world.

But the innovations that arise from this freewheeling environment can shape the way we think about embryos and even change how we treat them, sometimes before we’ve realized that such a shift is unfolding.

For more information see Anna Louie Sussman “Should Human Life be Optimized?” The New York Times, April 2, 2025. 

Special thanks to Lewis Saret (Attorney, Washington, D.C.) for bringing this article to my attention.