Inside the Silicon Valley push to breed super-babies

Noor Siddiqui, the founder of an embryo-screening start-up and the guest of honor at the backyard event in Austin, offered a grand vision of custom-built algorithms and genome analysis that would help eradicate illness and disease. Shivon Zilis, a tech executive who had just given birth to Elon Musk’s then-secret 13th child, and other guests donned pastel-colored baseball hats Siddiqui handed out. They were emblazoned with a single word: BABIES.

Siddiqui is a rising star in the realm of fertility start-ups backed by tech investors. Her 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. For now, her approach has been taken up mostly in her moneyed social circle. But one day, maybe not far off, it could change the way many babies are made everywhere — posing new moral and political questions as reproduction could increasingly become an outcome not of sex but of genetic preselection and data-mining.

It is now standard for pregnant women and couples undergoing in vitro fertilization to test for rare genetic disorders stemming from a single gene mutation, such as cystic fibrosis, or chromosomal abnormalities such as Down syndrome. But Orchid is the first company to say it can sequence an embryo’s entire genome of 3 billion base pairs. It uses as few as five cells from an embryo to test for more than 1,200 of these uncommon single-gene-derived, or monogenic, conditions. The company also applies custom-built algorithms to produce what are known as polygenic risk scores, which are designed to measure a future child’s genetic propensity for developing complex ailments later in life, such as bipolar disorder, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, obesity and schizophrenia.

For more information see Elizabeth Dwoskin and Yeganeh Torbati “Inside the Silicon Valley push to breed super-babies,” The Washington Post, July 16, 2025.

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