Repronews #26: Orchid’s Siddiqui makes case for embryo selection
Repronews #26: Orchid’s Siddiqui makes case for embryo selection
Major demographic conference in Rome; heritability of gout; suppression of Aboriginal fertility in 1960s Australia
Welcome to the latest issue of Repronews! Highlights from this week’s edition:
Repro/genetics
WIRED interviews Orchid Health Founder and CEO Noor Siddiqui on genetic embryo selection
Population Policies & Trends
Italian government holds high-level conference in Rome on family formation and future demographics
Genetic Studies
Heritability and prevention of gout
Further Learning
History of suppression of Aboriginal fertility in 1960s Australia
Repro/genetics
“This woman will decide which babies are born” (WIRED)
WIRED interviewed Noor Siddiqui, founder of and CEO of Orchid Health, a company pioneering polygenic embryo selection.
Orchid is enabling prospective parents to select embryos with less chance of developing both monogenic and polygenic disoders, such as Alzheimer’s schizophrenia, breast and prostate cancer, and diabetes.
Orchid screening costs $2,500 per embryo.
Siddiqui, a Stanford-trained computer scientist, became involved in reprogenetics in part because her mother became partially blind due to a genetic condition, retinitis pigmentosa. She also started the company to test her own embryos. “Reproduction is one of the most fundamental things in life. It’s like you die, taxes, and, you know, people have kids,” Siddiqui said.
Siddiqui argues that science should be used to protect future people from suffering. That’s why as a teenage Thiel Fellow she launched a medical startup. (Thiel Fellowships allow promising young people to drop out of college early to launch companies.) At 25, Siddiqui started Orchid.
In 2022, Siddiqui underwent IVF and had 16 resulting embryos tested by Orchid. The company calculates each embryo’s likelihood of one day suffering from over 1,200 diseases and conditions about which we currently have genetic information.
Orchid has 16 employees and $12 million in funding. Its services are available in 40 IVF clinics across the United States and have thousands of customers. This includes several big-name figures in tech.
Siddiqui argues that polygenic embryo selection can reduce suffering and help people participate more fully in society. It can also help populations with predispositions to diseases. “South Asians, for instance, have really high rates of heart attacks and diabetes,” she said. “I think that’s really unfair.”
Siddiqui said improved genetics will not solve all human suffering: “Unfortunately, not all disease is genetic. There will still be disease and suffering. We are not … an optimistic fantasy. … It’s just going to make it so that more parents can feel more confident and have more information going into the most important decision of their life, which is to have a child.”
Orchid is able to sequence 99.6% of embryos’ DNA on average. “Whole genome is a big deal and a massive upgrade,” Siddiqui said. “You can mitigate risks for thousands of diseases that previously you weren’t able to detect. It’s kind of like a vaccine for everything that we know, genetic-wise, at once.”
Siddiqui argues new genetic testing technology should be used when available: “I would consider it negligent to use the old technology. Because you’re by definition missing hundreds of things that could have been detected. Parents who are not told that this new technology exists are being done a huge disservice and will probably be suing if their child ends up with a condition.”
Siddiqui is concerned that the strains and risks of pregnancy and childbirth are leading many women to not have children. “The population of all of the places we love is shrinking,” she said “In 50 years, 30 years, you’ll have half as many people in places that you love. Society will collapse. We have to solve it. It’s very critical.”
Siddiqui recently participated in a podcast with Build the Future on the future of families, conception, and genetics.
More on repro/genetics:
“IVF and the Alabama Supreme Court decision to protect embryos” (PET)
“Evolution of minimally invasive and non-invasive preimplantation genetic testing: An overview” (Journal of Clinical Medicine)
“Generative artificial intelligence to produce high-fidelity blastocyst-stage embryo images” (Human Reproduction)
“Alabama Supreme Court’s IVF ruling turned professor into a reproductive-rights refugee” (Indiana Capital Chronicle)
Population Policies & Trends
Rome holds high-level conference in on family formation and future demographics (Nova)
Italian Minister of the Family, Natality, and Equal Opportunities Eugenia Roccella held a high-level conference in Rome entitled “For a Young Europe: Demographic Transition, Environment, Future.”
Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni and EU Commissioner for Demography Dubravka Šuica were among the participants.
Commissioner Šuica said she was “[t]hrilled to join leaders and experts in Rome to discuss the future of demography. Together, we’re shaping policies that support all life stages and strengthen EU resilience. Let’s make demographic change a springboard for innovation!”
Šuica argued for using EU funds to tackle demographic issues, saying: “We need joint efforts at all levels of governance to mitigate impacts of demographic trends and regional disparities.”
In her remarks, Prime Minister Meloni flagged the need for all levels of government and international organizations like the EU and the OECD to tackle demographic challenges.
“For us the demographic challenge, the birth rate, the economic sustainability that is connected to these factors, represent one of the main challenges,” Meloni said. “It was time to have a Government courageous enough to dedicate itself to demographics and birth rates as priority challenges that must be transversal to the action of the whole Government.”
Meloni cited cultural, economic, and social factors undermining family formation. She said anti-natalist values “risk dragging Italy and Europe to the edge of the precipice and leading us to believe that the myth to be pursued is that of happy degrowth, also applied to the birth rate … breaking that generational pact on which every nation has always existed and prospers.”
Meloni said she aimed to avoid “demographic glaciation” and cited the fact her Government had invested €2.5 billion for family credits and over €16 billion in family support in general in 2024.
Currently, no European nation is above the replacement fertility rate, but Italy has among the lowest with 1.24 children per woman.
Meloni said the EU post-COVID stimulus plan was being used in Italy to invest €3 billion to create 2,600 nurseries.
Family Minister Rocella said there need to be “policies that support the family, female work, equal opportunities. This government pays close attention to the problem, since it introduced birth-rate targets that didn’t exist before. This is a turning point.”
“Motherhood must no longer represent an obstacle in the path of professional fulfillment for women,” Rocella added. “It is one of the great objectives that this government has set itself after years of inattention.”
In Milan, a statue representing a breastfeeding woman was not allowed in a public square. “This is precisely the example of how motherhood is no longer perceived as a value social, but only as an individual choice that does not concern society,” Rocella said. “Instead, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding are not just a personal choice, they are a choice that has a social value.”
More on population policies and trends:
“Who’s afraid of falling birth rates? Why conservatives are wrong to be obsessed with fertility, but liberals have reason to worry (Medium/Dustin Arrand)
“Are Americans rediscovering marriage?” (Mercator)
Genetic Studies
Is gout hereditary? Understanding the role of genetics (VeryWellHealth)
Gout is a type of inflammatory arthritis that tends to run in families.
The heritability of gout is estimated between 45% and 73%.
Various genes involved in the development of gout have been identified. Genetic testing can help healthcare providers identify who might develop gout.
While reducing genetic risk for gout is not possible in people already born, risk of developing the condition can be mitigated by not smoking or drinking alcohol, avoiding a purine-rich diet, losing weight, and managing health conditions like diabetes, kidney disease, and high blood pressure.
More on genetic studies:
“Shared genetic architecture between autoimmune disorders and B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia: insights from large-scale genome-wide cross-trait analysis” (BMC Medicine)
The study found that in Beagles genetic regulation of immune response to vaccination is antigen-specific and influenced by multiple genes of small effect. “Heritability and genome-wide association study of vaccine-induced immune response in Beagles: A pilot study” (Vaccine)
Further Learning
“‘Too many Aboriginal babies’: Australia’s secret history of Aboriginal population control in the 1960s” (The Conversation)
In their 1967 referendum, Australians massively voted to include Aborigines in official population counts. This was a major step in recognition of Aborigines.
At the same time in the 1960s however, many white Australian experts considered Aboriginal population growth was too fast. Government family-planning programs sought to curb their fertility.
Aboriginal scholars such as Jackie Huggins and Aileen Moreton-Robinson have criticised the story of birth control as liberation. They argue that, while white women demanded contraception and abortion, Aboriginal women have insisted on their right to have and raise their children.
The Aboriginal population plummeted in the 19th century, through disease and violence. Having children became part of the battle for survival.
Until the middle of the 20th century, white Australia largely presumed Aboriginal people were a “dying race,” remnants of which should be assimilated.
When the 1966 Australian census results were published in November 1967, they told a new story about the Aboriginal population: it was growing, rapidly. In August 1968, The Canberra Times reported the Aboriginal birth rate was “twice the Australian average” and the “full-blood” birth rate would soon “equal or exceed the rate of the part-Aborigines”.
In his 1969 letter to the Courier Mail, John Francis, professor of preventative medicine at the University of Queensland, predicted an Aboriginal population of 360 million by 2200 if current birth rates continued.
Jarvis Nye, a founder of the prestigious Brisbane Clinic, described the “alarming situation in the quality of our young Australians.” He wrote that Aboriginal peoples were having “much larger families than our intelligent and provident European and Asian citizens.” Nye advocated providing “instruction in contraception” and free intrauterine devices (IUDs), and sterilization to Aboriginal people.
Administrators often favored IUDs as these were long-lasting and did not require correct daily use.
In 1969, alarm around the Aboriginal birth rate escalated into national politics. MP Douglas Everingham agreed the “Aboriginal birth rate is excessive” and suggested free sterilization.
These concerns also focused on infant mortality. Aboriginal infant mortality was double that of white children. In central Australia, it was “10 times the white Australian rate.” The Aboriginal population continued to rise despite this.
In July 1968, the Northern Territory administration’s welfare branch and the Health Department outlined their plans for Aboriginal women. Pilot projects would address the supposed “special problems” of family planning education “among unsophisticated Aboriginals in remote locations”. The government said these programs would be “sensitive” as it was aware of Aboriginal communities’ fears family planning was “a white plot to wipe out the Aboriginal race.”
The director for welfare in the Northern Territory, Harry Giese, assessed the success of the “family planning” projects by the percentage of the Aboriginal women who had adopted contraception. Around 250 women out of 4,500 (5.5%) were participating in a family planning programme by 1972.
The fact that welfare and fertility were linked may have given Australian administrators the ability to coerce Aboriginal women to adopt contraception.
Even today, the rates of Aboriginal children in out-of-home care are shocking: 43% of children in out-of-home care in Australia are Aboriginal, whereas Aboriginals only make up 3.8% of the general population.
The article argues for fertility care to Aboriginal women to be run by Aboriginal people. More people than ever in Australia identify as Indigenous and the population is growing.
More on human nature, evolution, and biotech:
“Longevity hinders evolutionary rescue through slower growth but not necessarily slower adaptation” (bioRxiv)
Sohrab Ahmari, “The new racist right are uniquely dangerous” (New Statesman)
“History of psychology telling a scientific story and governing the poppulation: The Kallikak story and the historical mutations of the eugenics discourse” (ResearchGate)
Disclaimer: The Genetic Choice Project cannot fact-check the linked-to stories and studies, nor do the views expressed necessarily reflect our own.