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Silicon Valley wants to help me make a superbaby
High-powered couples are turning to genetic-testing startups to help “design” their offspring. I decided to take the first steps myself.
Studies have shown that assigning “risk scores” for polygenic diseases is still a crapshoot, the results “random” and “inconsistent,” while critics claim they over-rely on data from people of European descent and offer parents a dangerous illusion of control. In spite of widespread doubts among scientists, over the last five years, tech heavyweights like Anne Wojcicki, Sam Altman, Vitalik Buterin, Elad Gil, and Alexis Ohanian have poured millions into the direct-to-consumer polygenic testing startups Orchid, Nucleus, and Genomic Prediction. But the timing was so convenient, I couldn’t help but wonder: if I hadn’t been a reporter cross-checking results across multiple services, would I still be working off a supposedly outdated score, going through life thinking I had a sky-high chance at type 2 diabetes?
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