God help the babies! Or, absent God, a fertility startup called Orchid. It offers prospective parents a fantastical choice: Have a regular baby or have an Orchid baby. A regular baby might grow up and get cancer. Or be born with a severe intellectual disability. Or go blind. Or become obese. A regular baby might not even make it to childbirth. Any of those things could still happen to an Orchid baby, yes, but the risk, says 29-year-old Noor Siddiqui, plummets if you choose her method. It's often called "genetic enhancement."
Whenever I bring up Orchid in polite company, people squirm. "I'm uncomfortable," they say. "Not for me." "So unnatural." Inevitably, Nazis get mentioned, as does a related word that starts with "eu" and ends in "genics." (Orchid prefers I not utter it.) One new mom I was talking to was particularly, headshakingly disturbed. Then, a few minutes later, in an attempt to change the subject, she announced to the room that she'd just fed her 6-month-old his first peanut, and that in three months' time she'd be feeding him his first shrimp, because that's what the science says she must do to protect him from developing allergies.
Which is, of course, the entirety of Siddiqui's pitch: to—based on what the science says—protect future people from future suffering. It's why, as a teenage Thiel Fellow, Siddiqui launched a medical startup; and why, at 25, she started Orchid. It's also why, now that the company's gene-enhancing product is available, she wanted to be one of its first customers.—Jason Kehe, features editor
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