Image by Allison Robbert / AFP via Getty / Futurism
An Austin eugenics startup apparently counts billionaire Elon Musk and his girlfriend, Neuralink director Shivon Zilis, among its clients.
That company, Orchid Health, provides tony clients the opportunity to screen their embryos for genetic illnesses starting at around $22,500. While there are a handful of similar genetic prediction firms, Orchid stands out by claiming that it can sequence embryos’ entire genome using as few as five cells and predict far more than its competitors.
And according to two sources close to the company who spoke to the Washington Post, its services have been used for at least one of Zilis and Musk’s four children.
While it’s not at all news that Musk, the father of at least 14 children by multiple women, is obsessed with reproduction, this claim — which expands on reporting from The Information last year — casts the billionaire’s pronatalism in a new and even more unsettling light.
One of WaPo‘s Orchid insiders, who was not named to protect their privacy, told the newspaper that 30-year-old company founder Noor Siddiqi had provided Musk and Zilis with special screenings, which supposedly use bespoke algorithms to determine the embryo’s potential for being intelligent. (While the company insists it’s not involved in “eugenics,“ a word meaning “good genes,” it is very literally helping parents select good genes, and the alleged intelligence selection does sound a lot like the dictionary definition of the practice.)
That claim appears to fall in line with a telling tidbit Zilis divulged to Musk biographer Walter Isaacson: that the billionaire “really wants smart people to have kids,” and that she chose to procreate with him after he encouraged her to have her own.
When WaPo reached out to Orchid to ask about Musk and Zilis, as well as those intelligence screening allegations, the company declined to comment and claimed that although it does screen for intellectual disabilities, it does not offer any predictions about a future child’s intelligence.
Be that as it may, services like Orchid’s are mired in both ethical and practical issues. Along with the perception that such services are tantamount to playing God, genetics experts who spoke with WaPo were very skeptical about Orchid’s claim that it can sequence an embryo’s entire genome from just five cells.
According to Svetlana Yatsenko, a Stanford research genetics specialist, the company’s use of a process called amplification, which copies DNA strands from small samples for analysis, is problematic because it’s essentially using photocopies that could introduce inaccuracies to either rule out or declare genetic disorders.
“You’re making many, many mistakes in the amplification,” Yatsenko told WaPo. “It’s basically Russian roulette.”
Beyond the broad strokes, Orchid’s own accountability problems appear much darker when considering how often Musk has cast bigoted aspersions on other races for their purported intellectual inferiority.
More on genetic services: Genetics Startup Advertises App-Based Eugenics Service for Parents to Select “Smartest” Embryos
