Orchid, a fertility startup, offers prospective parents the choice to have a regular baby or an Orchid baby with reduced risks of genetic disorders. The concept of genetic enhancement raises ethical concerns and discomfort among some people.
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.
Because if you have BRCA, for example, that’s not a guarantee that you have breast cancer, but it makes you, I think, four or five times more likely. Plenty of existing companies, like 23andMe, already screen for BRCA variants. 23andMe does an array. They only look at, I think, 44 BRCA variants of the 70,000. If you only look at a few, then you can give people false certainty. And they’re obviously not testing embryos. Yeah, they just do people.
Fertility Startup Orchid Genetic Enhancement Babies Risks Ethical Concerns
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