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'Inside the Silicon Valley Push to Breed Super-Babies'
San Francisco-based startup Orchid Health "screens embryos for thousands of potential future illnesses," reports the Washington Post, calling it "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 mor...
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. Yet several genetic scientists told The Post they doubt Orchid's core claim: that it can accurately sequence an entire human genome from just five cells collected from an early-stage embryo, enabling it to see many more single- and multiple-gene-derived disorders than other methods have. A pioneer of polygenic risk scores, Harvard epidemiology professor Peter Kraft, has criticized Orchid, saying on X that "the science doesn't add up" and that "waving a magic wand and changing some of these variants at birth may not do anything at all."
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