The Woman Helping Create Superbabies

Noor Siddiqui is building technology that people call "designer babies"—and she's thought more carefully about the ethics than most of her critics. At 16, she decided she wanted to screen embryos for genetic disease. Today, as founder of Orchid, she does exactly that: scanning the full genome of IVF embryos to identify thousands of genetic risks, letting parents make more informed choices about which embryo to transfer. The result has divided the tech world, the medical world, and honestly, everyone in between.

What started as a personal mission—sparked by her mother's diagnosis with retinitis pigmentosa and the realization that genetic screening could prevent catastrophic outcomes like stillbirth and infant death—has become one of biotech's most polarizing frontiers. Orchid has helped hundreds of thousands of families, yet the company faces fierce pushback from people who see technology touching birth as inherently wrong. Siddiqui doesn't dismiss that discomfort; she engages with it, and she's surprisingly sympathetic to the concerns that matter most.

Join us for a searching conversation about what it means to grow up loved unconditionally, how a pole-vaulting face-plant teaches you to fail productively, why she's spent nearly two decades thinking about embryo screening, which criticisms of her field actually cut deep, the stranger at a party who told her she saved his life, and what legacy really means when you're hoping to someday just be a grandmother.