Designer Babies, AI Friends, and Mind-Reading Computers

Tipping Point Quick Hits (07.24.25)

The Silicon Valley Plan for “Designer Babies”

A disturbing article last week in The Washington Post revealed the attempts by Silicon Valley tech startups to shift from natural conception of infants to embryo “selection” based on data. In other words: Designer babies.

A new company on the West Coast is offering whole-genome sequencing and polygenic risk scoring to parents. The goal is to identify embryos who have lower risk for more than 1,200 diseases—including Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia.

The company is backed by high-profile billionaires like Peter Thiel of Paypal. Here’s more about the embryo-screening founder, Noor Siddiqui:

Siddiqui is a rising star in the realm of fertility start-ups backed by tech investors. Her company, San Francisco-based Orchid Health, screens embryos for thousands of potential future illnesses, letting prospective parents plan their families with far more information about their progeny than ever before. For now, her approach has been taken up mostly in her moneyed social circle. But one day, maybe not far off, it could change the way many babies are made everywhere—posing new moral and political questions as reproduction could increasingly become an outcome not of sex but of genetic preselection and data-mining.