Inside Silicon Valley’s push to breed super-babies

硅谷培育超级婴儿的推动浪潮中

Post Reports

2025-10-15

21 分钟
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A crop of Silicon Valley startups offers the hope of eradicating disease by testing embryos for genetic abnormalities and the potential for future illness. But those tests come with a high price tag and ethical questions about the use of predictive technology to decide who gets born – or not. Host Elahe Ezadi speaks with Silicon Valley correspondent Elizabeth Dwoskin about the cutting-edge science driving fertility startups, what families who use them say, and how this trend fits into Silicon Valley’s obsession with hacking our health. Today’s show was produced by Laura Benshoff and Arjun Singh. It was edited by Ariel Plotnick and mixed by Sam Bair.  Subscribe to The Washington Post here.
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  • Silicon Valley is on a quest to optimize babies.

  • This is baby Jaffe.

  • Oh my goodness.

  • So what is the first couple of months to like?

  • This is from a promotional video for a company called Orchid Health.

  • It offers advanced genetic testing for embryos.

  • In the video, mom Leah leans over a baby in a bouncy chair.

  • Leah describes how Orchid helped her and her husband create baby Jaffe.

  • They tested their embryos, talked to a genetic counselor.

  • We actually talked with one of the genetic counselors with Arkad.

  • We went online and looked at all the results, and then selected an embryo for implantation.

  • So as you would, you were once an embryo.

  • But for us, the embryo test...

  • Lizard Dwaskin is the post-Silicon Valley correspondent.

  • She's been reporting on startups like Arkad that are getting into the fertility game.

  • Orchid Health is a company here in San Francisco that's part of this growing crop of startups that are offering what I would call a brave new world of genetic predictions.

  • These companies screen embryos for health issues,

  • but they're not just looking for health issues now.

  • They're trying to predict ones that could develop decades after a baby is born once they've grown into an adult.

  • Issues like cancer or Alzheimer's.