While it is no novelty that Musk, father of at least 14 children of several women, is obsessed with reproduction, now he would have gone a step further: he would have invested in A Austin Eugenics Startup apparently counts among its clients to billionaire Elon Musk and his girlfriendthe director of Neuralink, Shivon Zilis.
The company, Orchid Health, offers high -level customers the opportunity to analyze their embryos to detect genetic diseases from about $ 22,500. While there are several similar genetic prediction companies, Orchid stands out in stating that it can sequence the complete embryos genome using only five cells and predict much more than its competitors.
To do this, according to your website, “They use complete genome data to identify monogenic and polygenic diseases. The alternatives do not detect the risks because they do not sequence the full genome ”.
Technology allows them to detect at least 7 types of cancer, neurological disorders and chromosomal abnormalities. And according to two sources close to the company that They talked to the Washington Post, Its services have been used for at least one of the four children of Zilis and Musk.
A source close to Orchid in Washington, which was not identified to protect its privacy, declared that Noor Siddiqi, 30 years old and founder of the company, had them provided to Musk and Zilis special tests that supposedly use custom algorithms To determine the embryo intelligence potential.
While the company insists on not being involved in “eugenics”, a word that means “good genes”, literally It helps parents select good genes, and the alleged selection of intelligence It looks a lot like the definition that the dictionary gives of this practice.
That statement seems to coincide with a revealing fact that Zilis told Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson: what The billionaire “really wants intelligent people to have children” and decided to procreate with him after he encouraged her to have his own.
When the Washington Post contacted Orchid to ask about Musk and Zilis, as well as the accusations of intelligence tests, The company refused to comment And he said that, although it performs tests to detect intellectual disabilities, it does not offer any prediction on the intelligence of a future child.
Be that as it may, services such as Orchid are involved in ethical and practical problems. In addition to the perception that these services are equivalent to playing to be God, the genetics experts who spoke with the Washington Post were shown Very skeptical of Orchid’s statement that it can sequence the complete genome of an embryo from just five cells.
According to Svetlana Yatsenko, a specialist in Stanford’s research genetics, the use by the company of a process called amplification, which copys DNA chains of small samples for your analysis, is problematic because, in essence, it uses photocopies that could introduce inaccuracies to rule out or declare genetic disorders.
Unfortunately, these rumors coincide with many of the statements made by Musk In the past linked to the superiority of certain races, which makes this initiative logic.