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Podcast Notes: Relentless - Episode #46: Noor Siddiqui, Founder & CEO of Orchid
Podcast Title: Relentless Episode Title: #46 - Noor Siddiqui, Founder & CEO of Orchid Episode Description: Discussion on embryo screening, genetic diseases, and the moral implications surrounding reproductive technology.
Summary In this episode, Noor Siddiqui discusses the transformative capabilities of Orchid, a company she founded to provide parents with comprehensive genetic screening of embryos created during IVF. The conversation covers the impact of genetic diseases, the limitations of traditional embryo selection methods, and the societal implications of advancing reproductive technology.
Key Topics Discussed
- The Importance of Genetic Screening
- Embryo Screening Capabilities:
- Orchid provides whole genome reports for embryos, allowing parents to have access to 99% of genetic data as opposed to the conventional 1%.
- This increased information enables screening for thousands of diseases, facilitating informed decisions about embryo selection.
- Impact on Health:
- Genetic testing can help avoid diseases such as cancers, birth defects, neurodevelopmental disorders, and complex genetic conditions.
- Parents can quantify genetic risks associated with each embryo, improving the chances of healthier births.
- Societal Context and Morality
- Siddiqui emphasizes the trauma associated with discovering severe genetic issues during pregnancy.
- The ability to "genetically bless" a child is positioned as a groundbreaking shift in reproductive technology, allowing parents to mitigate risks previously left to chance.
- Cultural and Economic Factors
- Discussion around the disparity of IVF access and genetic screening costs in the U.S. versus Europe, where IVF tends to be subsidized and more accessible.
- Current IVF costs in the U.S. average around $30,000, with additional screening costs potentially limiting access for lower-income families.
- Challenges and Reactions
- Siddiqui recounts the challenging emotional landscape of facing skepticism and moral backlash from the public regarding reproductive technologies.
- She highlights how societal fears often accompany new technology, similar to past reactions to innovations like IVF and birth control.
- Personal Stories and Experiences
- Noor shares her personal connection to genetic testing through her family history of conditions like celiac disease and arthritis.
- The narrative includes reflections on community support, especially during events like baby showers for Orchid families.
Key Takeaways
- Advancements in Genetic Technology:
- The evolution of embryo screening represents a significant leap from traditional methods that relied on visual assessments.
- Empowerment through Information:
- Providing parents with essential genetic information empowers them to make decisions that can profoundly affect their child's health trajectory.
- Societal Paradigms:
- As technology progresses, societal norms and moral concerns will inevitably shift, requiring ongoing dialogue about the implications of genetic screening.
- Emotional Toll of Genetic Disorders:
- The psychological impact of genetic diseases on families highlights the importance of preventative technologies.
Final Thoughts Noor Siddiqui expresses a deep commitment to ensuring that families can access the necessary tools to make informed decisions about their children’s health. The conversation illustrates the potential for technological innovation to reshape reproductive choices and the ongoing challenges of changing societal perceptions surrounding genetic screening.
Conclusion This episode of Relentless with Noor Siddiqui offers valuable insights into the intersection of technology, health, and morality in reproductive choices. The advancements presented by Orchid provide a glimpse into a future where genetic screening could become a standard practice, enhancing the health and wellbeing of future generations.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00A pregnancy is an extremely intense thing, right? like you're metabolically running a marathon every single day for nine months to create this human inside of you. The idea that midway through that process, you find out that this baby doesn't have a skull isn't going to be able to come to term. Like it's extremely traumatic. For the first time ever, parents have this ability to help them avoid a whole category of disease that previously was left entirely to chance. This is Noor Siddiqui, and she is the founder of ORCID. Do you want to just do a quick description on what is ORCID? Yeah. So what ORCID helps parents do is it helps them protect their baby before they're even born.
0:38And the way that we do that is that we help parents get whole genome reports on their embryos. So what does that actually mean? So when people go through IVF, they make multiple embryos. And when they make those multiple embryos in the IVF center, that decision of which embryo to transfer is currently made almost blind, right? So they have extremely limited information, so about 1 % of the genome, and they usually do this sort of beauty contest where they look at the embryo under a microscope, and they say based on the morphology or how does it look under their microscope, they choose which embryo to transfer, right?
1:13So what ORCID does is it completely changes that. It upgrades the amount of information that parents get access to. Instead of that 1 % of the genome, they get 99%, which means they get 100 times the data. They can scan for thousands of diseases that previous technology completely missed. And yeah, it allows them to make a more informed decision going into their pregnancy and avoid diseases like pediatric cancers, adult onset cancers, birth defects, neurodevelopmental disorders, genetic forms of autism, more genetically complex diseases where it's not just driven by a single monogenic condition, but things that are driven by the cumulative impact of many millions of genetic variants.
1:57So things like celiac disease, things like heart disease, schizophrenia, bipolar. You can also look at genetic risk scores for those diseases and then quantify the genetic risk of each embryo. You can see, okay, this embryo is the 99th percentile of risk versus this embryo in the 50th percentile of risk. So what parents are able to do is they're able to move the genetic risk of their embryos, which previously, you know, for you and I is an immovable risk factor, right? Like you have this decision in life of, you know, do I want to smoke or do I not want to smoke? Great. That like drastically changes your health trajectory, but our genetics, our genetic risk is fixed.
2:37So what's really powerful about this tool is that for the first time ever, parents have this ability to genetically bless their child, right? Help them avoid a whole category of disease that previously was left entirely to chance. So yeah, it's really exciting for parents to be already using these tools today to mitigate the disease that they're most concerned about for their family. Do you want to talk about where we are and like the baby shower today? Yeah. So today we're by the amazing Golden Gate Bridge. We have an amazing water view and it's in honor of Astra, one of the orchid babies that was born.
3:15And it was just amazing to get, you know, the entire community, you know, surrounding the parents and the new baby. And there's some other orchid babies that are in San Francisco that got to attend. So, yeah, it's just really, I think, unfortunately unusual to, like, be surrounded by a bunch of babies in San Francisco. But we made it happen. So it's great. Yeah, I thought this was more babies than I've seen, like, in close proximity ever in San Francisco. Yeah, I know. Which is nice. I know. I got a lot of texts about it being like, whoa, this is like, I haven't seen this many babies. It has happened a while.
3:50So, yeah, it was fun. And I think it's a little bit, babies are a little bit mimetic. You know, I think like once you see one, you're like, oh, my gosh, you're so cute. And then people get excited for them. So I think babies would get more babies. Yeah, they're an incredible sales force. Yeah, no, they are. It's just they're incredibly cute. So there's a lot of people who are like recently engaged who are like, you know, wow, okay, I see. You know, they might have been putting it off before, but they might be more excited about it after they saw. Yeah, just how cute they are. I know that for like my own personal family, we have a whole bunch of like random genetic conditions.
4:22Yeah. What's going on in your family? Tell me more. We've got celiac disease, my sister and dad. And then we have arthritis, gout, a number of other autoimmune problems and like all that stuff. What was that like for you guys growing up? Not a bunch of tasty food in the house. Yeah. Yeah. because there was no gluten and so you were and then they were also vegetarian so that was not awesome but uh did it take a while for you for them to get diagnosed or was it like uh my sister I think it was like a number of years and so she would just like cough all night oh wow like the first five or six years of her life I believe wow so like I think that her sleep too yeah yeah it was not great not optimal I would I would be curious like how do how do uh parents feel because this is one of those things where you take the test, I believe, and then like figure out what all might be a problem.
5:12How do people react when they kind of like realize how many things could be go, you know, could go wrong? Yeah, I think people are honestly pretty surprised by how much is genetic, right? So I think kind of just, you know, some of the like facts and figures here, right? Like so 25 % of infant deaths in the NICU, neonatal intensive care unit are due to genetic disease, right? 60 % of moderate to severe intellectual disability is due to a genetic cause. 50 % of miscarriages are due to a genetic cause. So I think that nobody realizes how large these numbers are. And I think that, you know, it's honestly a little bit hard to keep up, right?
5:50Because every single year, people are cataloging more and more genetic diseases. So whatever the number was last year, it's going to be slightly higher, you know, um and how many kids is that in like the NICU like how many people so 25 percent die because of genetic disease uh how many is that is it like a thousand a year or um I don't know the exact absolute number that's that study is citing um I think it's like an aggregate of like maybe uh 10 or 15 NICUs um around the country um because obviously you know the aggregate number is pretty pretty hard to find but yeah we can like look it up and chop it in with the exact numbers but basically in the entire U.S.
6:25about the best estimates are 10 % of the population has a rare genetic disease. So it's about 30 million Americans. But obviously it's a very small subset are infant death, right? Obviously that's like the most severe, that's like one, you know, super severe category. Another really interesting stat I think is that about 25 % of people who are in the ER as adults who are there for a non-traumatic injury, right? So who aren't there for a car crash, you know, under 40, the reason why they're there ends up being for a genetic reason, right? So it's crazy, right? Like people have these sort of ticking time bombs and they come up, they occur at sort of a random time, right?
7:05So for my mom, you know, she started going blind in her 30s, right? And that was a sort of a genetic ticking time bomb. And then, yeah, for these folks who end up in the ER, right, they're sort of, you know, their heart stops suddenly, right? And they thought it's, you know, the heat, but it's actually, you know, there's a cardiac condition that's underlying, you know, all of that. So yeah, I think it's really surprising just how like the fact that it's a double digit percentage. What's crazy is that's like 10 % of US adults, right? For 300 or 30 million Americans having a genetic disease. Having a rare disease and the vast majority of those are genetics.
7:41About 80 % of rare disease is genetic and then half of those are affected are children. So that's the other thing that's crazy is that 95 % of rare disease that is predominantly genetic does not have a treatment, right? So it's not only is there not a cure, but there's not even a treatment 95 % of the time. So basically there's these thousands of different genetic diseases that we've cataloged, but, you know, and individually they're extremely rare, but in aggregate they end up being, you know, quite common. But it's really interesting that you mentioned celiac disease specifically because that's actually one that people are, that people really commonly diminish.
8:17And I think that that's really unfair, right? Because if you're not living with the condition, it's really hard to be, you know, judgmental about it, right? Because people will say, oh, Alzheimer's, well, that doesn't affect you until you're older. Well, it's like, okay, are you a caregiver for a parent with Alzheimer's? Do you know what it's like, you know, to actually, you know, lose your memory, right? And same for celiac. It's like, oh, you know, you just avoid gluten. It's like, okay, well, have you actually talked to someone with celiac disease? What it's like? Do they want, you know, their child to have it?
8:43Do they want their loved ones to have it if they can avoid it. So I think every restaurant that you go into, it's like a rolling the dice on if they actually like clean the kitchen and, you know, put on different gloves and stuff when you're making making food. Yeah, exactly. There's no way to monitor them. And then like, just it impacts your life across like, okay, so then if you accidentally, it's not even an accident, right? Someone told you that it's going to be fine. But then in reality, it wasn't. And then now, okay, you're messed up for the next two days. Like, it's not fun to like have that kind of, you know, uncertainty.
9:13How fast do you think, like, personally, I'm going to immediately adopt this. And I think most of the people that I interact with will. But how fast do you think that it's just going to be like, when will the last baby that's not pre screened be born? Is your guess? Oh, I think there's actually always going to be babies that are going to be born the old fashioned way. You know, think about smartphones, say smartphones are probably one of the most widely spread technology. There's, I think, billions of smartphones out there, but it's still not everyone has one. So yeah, I think when it comes to something like babies, right now, over 50 % of births are accidental.
9:51People are not planning their pregnancy and they get pregnant anyways. So I think that'll continue to happen. But I think that the fraction of births that are going to become intentional and that are through ORCID, where people are going to actually prioritize maximizing their child's genetic health and they want their child to be genetically blessed, I think that it is going to become increasingly more common, right? You know, fetal alcohol syndrome has gone down since, you know, we now know that it's a condition, right? Like don't drink when you have, when you're pregnant. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
10:25Yeah, exactly. People used to drink when they were pregnant, they didn't know, right? So now that we know that that's, you know, that that leads to poor outcomes for infants, people stopped doing it, right? So I think it's the same kind of thing, right? Now, this new capability for humanity got unlocked, which is that, you know, before you had to roll the dice and just get a random outcome. Like, are you going to have, you know, genetics that allow you to, you know, live until you're 90 or are you going to have genetics that are going to, you know, literally kill you before your first birthday, right?
10:54Like, it's not, it's a, the genetic lottery is incredibly unfair. And now you finally have this ability to make it more equal and more fair for everyone, right? Everyone gets to have, you know, you know, at this start at the same place, right? Being able to just like have all your limbs, right? Have your vision, have your hearing, right? I mean, I think it's really easy for people to take that for granted because a lot of the people that you interact with, you know, you know, are sighted, you know, can hear, you don't have neurodevelopmental delay, but there's this huge, you know, fraction of people like millions of parents, right, who have children who are never going to be able to live independently, right, who are never going to be able to meet developmental milestones, like being able to walk, being able to talk, being able to, you know, read a book or speak, right?
11:42There's children who are nonverbal and it's through no fault of their own, right? They just literally have, you know, broken genes that don't allow their brain to form, their spinal cord to form, their skeleton to form, right? Like that's incredibly unfair and it's, it's cruel and we have, we have nothing to fix it or to help those families. And I think that, um, you know, it's a, I don't know, I feel really honored to be able to like help, you know, families who've had, um, you know, really, uh, catastrophic outcomes, uh, be able to, you know, now plan for their next child to be, you know, healthy and, you know, be able to have a normal life.
12:18And I think that for, um, yeah, the vast majority of families who are, you know, thinking about their, you know, the biggest moment in their life, right? Like, I think when people talk about their lives, it's like, you know, I think having kids is probably the top, the top one, or maybe the top life experience, top three life experience, right? So it's like, the idea that we have more data going into, you know, where you go to, where do you go for lunch, like what shoes you're going to buy, all these like super trivial decisions is insane. And I think that you're optimizing so many things in life and then you just forget the entire like big one.
12:56Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like, you know, what is it? Pennywise or, you know, pound foolish, right? So it's like, we're constantly like ingesting massive amounts of data over things that are completely frivolous and irrelevant, like skincare or lunch or like what song we should listen to, right? It's like who it really doesn't matter versus I think the biggest impact on your child's health is going to be their genome, right? Like the biggest impact on their health trajectory is, you know, do they get pediatric cancer or not? You know, versus, you know, the things that people agonize over, which is like, oh, what color should I paint my nursery?
13:30Do I want organic food or, you know, processed food? Or do I, you know, what preschool should they go to? Or which nanny should I have, right? Like these are all important parenting decisions, but I mean, they're a rounding error compared to does your kid have genetics that are compatible with life or not, right? Yeah, the other thing too, is like, even if you're mostly like a functioning human in society, if you're born with something that like knocks you out for even months at a time or weeks at a time, like celiac, like, you know, if you let's say that once a week, you get exposed to gluten.
14:02And that happens for the entirety of your life. That's 52, you know, let's say a day or two of slight under productivity. Yeah, that's a huge amount of lost productivity. Yeah, that human being. Yeah. And it's crazy that you wouldn't want to like spend i think i think i looked at it like right before this it was like 2500 for one like screening right yeah for each embryo yeah yeah how so how does that cost is is that cost actually like prohibitive in any way or what's the like main limiting factor right now to just scaling up massively um i think it's just knowledge honestly right like i think that um the i actually don't think that the price point is really um much of a because basically right now we're still living in a world where a lot of people are paying out of pocket for IVF, right?
14:46So like IVF in the U.S. costs like, you know, around$30 ,000. In Europe, it's like$5 ,000 all in, right? Like including the medication. In the U.S., just the medication alone costs like between$3 ,000 and$5 ,000. You know, it's a racket. It's, you know, we have, you know, worse laws in terms of like affordability. Bad incentives or something? Yeah, bad incentives around like generics and things like that. So yeah, there's like this like huge cost disparity just for IVF itself. And then also in a lot of European countries, IVF is covered. You don't even have to pay that five. So if you want to pay cash for IVF, like as an American travel to Europe, you'll pay, you know,$5 ,000 all in.
15:25But Europeans often it's, you know, fully covered by, you know, by their health insurance, right? And so there's like this like massive difference in what the cost is in the US versus in Europe. And I think that also really drives like changes utilization, right? Like if you make something free, obviously a lot more people are going to use it than if it's extremely expensive. So it's kind of crazy that in the US, we're already living in this world where, you know, rich people get to have kids and poor people don't because rich people can afford IVF and poor people can't, right? So the population of people who are already getting IVF today, where they either can pay out of pocket for it or they, you know, have coverage to their employer, for them, you know, for the vast majority of them, 2 ,500 per embryo isn't, isn't, isn't, isn't make or break, right?
16:14I think that the larger problem is that how do we make it so that everyone can afford IVF, right? So IVF now is taking that, you know, national stage, right? Trump is kind of famously saying that he's now, you know, the father of IVF, which, you know, isn't factually true, but it's still great that he's like, you know, embracing the technology finally. So I think it's great that it's now, you know, getting that national attention. And I think that IVF will eventually be covered. Next year is going to be covered in California and hopefully it'll be covered nationwide. And I think that'll be, yeah, that'll be a massive unlock because then all these families who are currently unable to afford it finally will.
16:51And then eventually I think that embryo screening will end up being covered as well. Because again, just from the know, the purely like accounting, like economic standpoint, like what's sort of the most expensive outcome for young, healthy adults, right? It's a baby who's in the, who's in the natal intensive care unit, the NICU. And so many, we just talked about how like a quarter of those are genetic. So if you can avoid, you know, some of those most, you know, expensive, most catastrophic outcomes for, you know, your employee base, like, you know, that'll, that'll just net out positive for you.
17:28Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Was there any things that you could have been born with, like genetic diseases that you just like got lucky on? Yeah, I think there's, there's a lot. So basically South Asians in general have like really high rates of like heart attacks and metabolic conditions like diabetes. So yeah, like my my grandfather got a, you know, I think double bypass. So it's sort of like, you know, that's, it's just not fun, right? So South Asians get heart attacks 10 years earlier and are twice as likely to die than, you know, almost any other ancestry. So yeah, like that's something that really matters to me, right?
18:09Like if you look about like all cause, you know, mortality, what kills people most often, it's cancer and heart disease, right? So, you know, heart disease is obviously up there. So yeah, that's like something that like really matters to me in terms of like, okay, hey, like, you know, with embryo screening, you can, you know, cut your, you know, our embryos relative risk by 30 to 80%, right? So that's like a massive number, especially since the base rate of heart disease is already so high in the population, but then even higher, even more enriched in South Asian. So I think that's a big one. Fortunately, that hasn't affected me yet but um did you screen yourself for it and you're like good or not yet oh heart disease yeah i'm i'm actually fortunately not at super high risk so yeah i guess i got again like kind of won the genetic lottery there too um but even i guess what i'm saying is like so even um even if you're at lower risk if you if you have a higher rate in your family then you're still at higher risk than average.
19:13So I'm basically at average risk for South Asians, which is still higher risk than Caucasians. So basically, to me, that's like one of the most useful things to minimize risk for because the base rate is so high. Other families are like super interested in things that are sometimes more rare, like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. But again, they're kind of interested because they had a family member that was affected or they themselves have suffered from it. So it really just depends. I think that's something that is just, yeah, just pretty surprising to me because something that one person will think is like totally inconsequential, doesn't matter at all.
19:54It's really important to someone else. It's super important, yeah. Like I think celiac is like one of those examples. Yeah, we got a really solid concoction in my family. I think one of my aunts has lupus, which is also another fun one. um but anyway i'm very excited to basically screen out all that stuff uh from my offspring yeah yeah um i would be curious like personally i love i would want to give my kids advantages and i'm wondering like how how soon are we going to be able to kind of like screen for like intelligence and that sort of thing yeah i think people are um i would say primarily interested in health like i think there's like you know some interest in this type of stuff but But I think that the vast majority of families that we actually talk to, I mean, even if you just talk to people in general, right, they're sort of like, oh, you know, how is mom doing?
20:46How's baby doing? Right. Like, are they healthy and happy? Right. Like that's I feel like that's like the primary thing. There are models for some of these other things like, you know, height and, you know, eye color and height or just focus on, you know, just purely like preventative on health specifically, because I think it's just more it's just more important. It's like the most critical thing. Right. But yeah, there are models for some of these other things. And I think that eventually it's probably going to become much more much less taboo than it is today to do that. I mean, if you think about the history of IVF, like sex screening was originally met with like really intense backlash and like a lot of moral hand rigging.
21:33Right. And now sex selection happens routinely all across the country. People do do IVF cycles electively for sex selection. So they call it family balancing. So people will have, you know, two boys and they really want to have a girl for their third. So they come and they do IVF totally electively. They don't have any fertility issue and they do it for sex selection, right? So it used to be that there was a lot of moral panic around that. And, you know, now, at least in the US, it's... Becoming way more, less taboo. It's become much more standard. But at the same time, even today, if you think about India or China, sex selection is actually not allowed there.
22:13So you cannot report the sex of an embryo in India or China. And people, I think, in the U.S. often have this impression that, oh, in China, that's like the Wild West. And you can learn anything you want there, but it's actually much more restricted there, right? So surrogacy is also not allowed in China. So there's actually a ton of fertility tourism from Asia and a lot of other parts of the world to the U.S. to get access to advanced embryo screening like ORCID, to get access to surrogacy. or to basically just get uncensored access to information about other embryos and to make these kinds of decisions.
22:48I mean, also China famously had the one-child policy. They also kind of engineered Yao Ming. They basically selected the tallest man and the tallest woman to get married and have kids together so that Yao Ming could be born. Right. So they're they're much more. Yeah, they they're they're they're much less free than the U.S. in terms of how constrained they are in terms of, you know, these these like pretty basic decisions about like, who should you marry? What information should you have access to, you know, during your pregnancy? And I think that that's is it more of a for both China and India, is it more of a like cultural thing or is it like a religious thing?
23:33Or why do those specific countries not really embrace it in the same way that the U.S. has? Oh, sex selection specifically? Sex selection and other things. Oh, well, in China and India, there's a very strong sex preference for males. So basically if they were to reveal that information, then it would result in a really bad consequence, not too far. So basically in the U.S., there's just not as much cultural baggage around that. There's actually a small sex preference toward women actually during IVF. So actually there's slightly more female embryos that are chosen in the U.S. So yeah, it's kind of interesting.
24:11I think like as a society, you have to know basically what's the info hazard, what's the information hazard, you know, for parents in that society. Right. And we kind of have to decide together what information should parents have access to and what parents, what information should they, you know, not have access to. Should be a little bit of a black box. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then I think, you know, India and China have made, you know, their own decision about, hey, sex, actually, you know, would cause would cause too many problems to give parents access to it. And, you know, they've they've stuck with that, I think, for almost, I think, 15 or 20 years now.
24:47Yeah. Is there any other information that like is not necessarily optimal to give to humans to let them decide? Or is it just mostly like around sex? Oh, well, I mean, I think the other big question is, you know, all of these traits that you're bringing up, right? So this idea of, you know, should parents have access to trait information like hair color and eye color and height and IQ, right? I think that is going to be a really big societal debate. Like, should parents in the US have access to it or not, right? Like, it's not just going to be a decision for, you know, Orchid to make specifically.
25:21I think it's something that like as a society, you know, we're it's going to be it's going to become like a national conversation around what what information should parents have and what you know, what is sort of too much information for parents to have. So it'll be interesting to see. I mean, I think that Americans are pro freedom and anti censorship. But, you know, you never know. There's still people who are debating IVF today. There's still people who are debating birth control today. There's still people who are debating condoms today. Right. So people have extremely different and strong opinions, not just about what they themselves should do, but what other people should be allowed to do.
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25:57So there will kind of always be some people that are unhappy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it'll be interesting to see how it shakes out. Yeah. What's been the most like meaningful experience that has happened through building this company? Honestly, I think it happens like quite frequently. Like it just it means a ton to me. Anytime we like receive a baby photo. Like anytime that someone, you know, gets pregnant, they get to have a healthy, happy pregnancy and, um, they get to have a healthy baby. It's like, I don't know. I feel like it's like the most meaningful thing that I could possibly do.
26:30Right. It's like, um, you know, again, it's like the happiest moment in their life and it gets to be a happy moment. Right. Um, it's really sad. The other side of it, right. Like there's so many people are coming to us after they've had, um, you know, multiple miscarriages sometimes. Right. They've had a late term termination. Sometimes you're at 20 weeks, 30 weeks late into your pregnancy and then you get an anatomy scan and you find a fatal anomaly. It's horrific. A pregnancy is an extremely intense thing. You're at your metabolic limit. You're literally metabolically running a marathon every single day for nine months to create this human inside of you.
27:15And then the idea that midway through that process, that's so physically taxing, that's so emotionally taxing, you find out that this baby doesn't have a skull, doesn't have a skeleton, isn't going to be able to come to term. Like it's, you know, extremely traumatic, right? So being able to avoid that so that people are able to transfer embryos that are going to lead to a healthy pregnancy and are going to be healthy babies is, yeah, I couldn't be like more honored to be able to work at that moment in people's lives because, yeah, it's just, it's something that has like so much meaning for them.
27:53And it's such a like, like drastic consequences for that child's future. And on the flip side from kind of like the most meaningful thing, what is the thing that kind of keeps you up the most at night? I don't know. I think to me, I'm really just worried about like reaching more families, right? Like I think this idea that one of these catastrophic outcomes happens that didn't have to, like that like makes me genuinely really sad, right? Because if people don't want to do it, then that's totally fine. but if they just didn't know that they could have done something and they would have they would have done something differently if they had the information that i think is like really really sad and that's like why i think it's really important you know to do these podcasts and like you know constantly be talking about it and like get as many of these families who've had um you know a positive experience out there because it's just something that um i want it to be as like as standard as an engagement ring right like every time you talk about getting engaged you think about this diamond.
28:55Okay. Who really cares about this diamond? Doesn't really matter versus, okay, like the health of your baby is something that's going to matter for their entire life. You know, there should be a conversation around like, okay, how can we maximize the chance that this child is healthy? Like what are the conditions that run in our families that, you know, that, that science understands a little bit better now that we can actually quantify and, you know, minimize the chance that something that, that affects our child. I want that to be like a more central part of the, you know, conversation around having babies.
29:28And I think that that's like the thing that, yeah, I would say is like the biggest worry is that, hey, are there families that could benefit from this? They just don't know. They just don't know that it's possible, right? They have never thought about this idea of, oh, I can make embryos, freeze them, and then, you know, transfer the one that's unaffected. I know. I think I looked it up like earlier today and it was something like two and a half percent of all births are IVF. yeah about in the u.s it's about two and a half percent do you know the number is in copenhagen no it's almost 10 yeah isn't that crazy it's almost double digits and again it's like oh it's it's subsidized by the government it's like free for for people um so yeah you get utilization that's like so is one of the things that you're gonna kind of have to do is try and figure out like how to get the government support on kind of rolling this out and making it basically free for people just kind of incentivizing it?
30:18I think that governments are going to choose to cover it. And I think that that'll have sort of a that will trigger other governments to act. Right. But I think that the great thing about it is that it doesn't require that to get started. Right. Like families like around the country already benefiting because they get to vote with their feet. They get to say that, hey, this is the thing that's going to benefit my family and I'm going to go seek it out wherever it is that I have to go. Some people are taking flights from around the world to get access to this. For a lot of Americans, it's, you know, nearby in their city.
30:53They don't have to travel too far to get access to it. And yeah, I think that eventually it will be something that, you know, governments and insurance companies get involved in. But it's kind of cool to be in this sort of little sort of niche where... Little bubble of people that realize. Yeah. Well, Well, not even just the bubble of people that realize, but it's sort of fortunate to be in this situation, actually, where a lot of innovation in healthcare actually gets killed because there's not this alignment between who's the person that benefits from it and who's the person who's actually paying for it, right?
31:27Like that distortion kills a lot of companies and kills a lot of great products and is kind of some of the reason why you have this sort of, you know, sclerotic healthcare system that doesn't actually help patients, right? It's because, well, patients aren't actually paying for it. The insurance company or the employer is paying for it, right? And that creates a lot of distortions. But what's actually a benefit and a curse of IVF is that because people vote with their feet, because people are actually paying out of pocket, and then they can actually say, okay, well, I want ORCID. I want whole genome embryo screening, or I don't.
31:58And then if their doctor says no, they just go elsewhere, right? And I think that that's actually really powerful to get people to change how they operate and to kind of upgrade to the latest technologies because the user is asking for it, right? Like our users literally got us, you know, the vast majority of these IVF centers recruited, right? Like patients literally came in and said that I'm not doing an IVF cycle with you unless I have access to ORCID. How many times has this happened? I think like, I think we're in over 100 IVF centers now. So like probably at least 70 or 80 times the majority of the clinics and And doctors that were onboarded were patient-led, actually.
32:40Crazy. Which is really cool, which is honestly insanely flattering. But basically, patients were like, you know, bulls in China shops and said that I am only going to go where I get access to Orchid. I want this data on my embryos. So, yeah, I think that's like, yeah, hugely flattering and powerful. But that interaction doesn't happen in the vast majority of health care. So it's actually like it sucks that so much of health care is stuck in a situation where, well, because the patient isn't paying for it, they don't actually get to have a say in how to make things better for them. Right. Yeah.
33:14They can't vote with their feet because someone else is voting for them kind of thing. Exactly. Yeah. There's like someone in HR at their at their company who's like deciding like what benefits should or should not be included in their health plan. Right. And there's some, you know, someone at UnitedHealthcare who's like denying access to this thing that they really want access to because there's not, you know, whatever bureaucratic process that they use to sort of decide what should and shouldn't be covered. Yeah, I'm not surprised on the whole like clinics, you know, deciding. I'm definitely surprised on 80.
33:44That's crazy. I have not heard of like, I don't know, customer led sales for that sort of thing. That's amazing. I do love there's very few companies that have some form of what you have on your website, which is this like wall of love. There's an entire page dedicated to just love. Yeah. How did you come up with that? Oh, I mean, I just think that we just realized that the biggest way. So the way the company started was me running my embryos like the first embryos that got run at Orchid's Lab were me and my husband's embryos. And then I basically went around with my embryo report to all my friends and was like, hey guys, these are my embryos.
34:21Isn't this so cool? I have the most data any human has ever had about my future babies before they're even born. Isn't this cool? And they're like, yes, it is very cool. I actually want it for myself. And then that's actually how we got all of our first users. And that's, I think, basically what led to the sort of whole cascade after that. The strongest referral is from your friend. Think about how important of a decision this is. This is literally like the most precious cells you will probably ever possess right your your embryos and then you're going to send them to like a random company to like analyze them like you you want your friend to have used it first the person that you trust like the most in the world says this worked for me yeah exactly and like you know you met their baby and like their baby's doing good and doesn't have whatever condition it is that they're worried about right like it's it's a huge amount of trust and i remember at the very beginning i um yeah i just felt this like well a i built the company because I wanted the product myself.
35:16So I wanted to be the first customer for that reason. But I also don't think I really would have, I wouldn't have been able to recommend it to anyone else, honestly, if I hadn't done it myself, because I just think that's how people are with their friends, right? If they haven't tried something out and been like, hey, this is awesome. They don't want to recommend to their friends, right? So it's like, I wasn't going to recommend it to my friends until I did it because what am I recommending, right? Did it start out as a company or just as like curiosity of you doing it and searching it out yourself?
35:46No, it started out as a company. So basically, I started out doing kind of a lot of different AI research at Stanford, and then it kind of ended up stumbling into a genomics lab. So a lab that's basically just joint. They have like genetic data, and they're joint with the AI lab at Stanford. And when I saw that, I kind of was really starstruck in the sense that like when I was, you know, in elementary school and middle school, I remember hearing about, hey, this human genome project. And like, eventually we're going to have all this data and we're going to be able to do all this really interesting stuff with it.
36:16But, you know, I, you know, was like, all right, well, I guess check back in in 10 years. Right. And then 10 years later, I actually saw it right now. There was like, you know, millions of people sequence. You had their, you know, genetic data and you had their medical records. And it's true. You could build these models. And then for me, I was really interested in embryos at that exact moment because I was getting engaged. And I was like thinking about babies in the concrete, like with a specific person rather than in the abstract. And then, you know, having grown up, you know, seeing how your life can get totally derailed by a random genetic typo can result in, you know, going from a sighted person to a non-sighted person.
36:56It was sort of like, okay, the biggest parenting decision that I'm ever going to make is my child's genome, right? Right. So I want to be able to see everything at the earliest possible stage, you know, before, you know, before things start to go wrong, before you're in this reaction mode of like, you know, you're in the room with the doctor and saying, hey, you know, I'm so sorry, but there's nothing else that we can do. Like, that's the situation that you want to avoid. So to me, I just thought as like, if I'm going to do one thing for my kid, it should be it should be this. And then you like walked into the first IVF clinic to do this yourself or people like supportive of just like, hell yeah, go screen your genome, all that stuff?
37:33Or what was that like? Oh, well, I did it at Stanford and a lot of our like medical advisors and stuff were from Stanford. So I've been working with them for years about it. So they knew that obviously I was going to, I wanted the maximum data, but no, I think it's, there's one of the things that I think is most interesting is just how much things have shifted in the last five years. Like, I think that like, you know, we truly did like create a category here, right? There's been like a ton of, you know, like kind of copycats and people who've kind of gotten into the space because of us. And I think that that's honestly really cool, right?
38:09Obviously, like, mimicry is like the highest form of flattery, right? So the fact that people are actually talking about reproductive technology, the fact that people are talking about artificial wombs, the fact that people are talking about, you know, IVG in vitro gamutogenesis, the idea of making, you know, egg cells from skin cells, I think all that is like really exciting because it used to be way more sci-fi. And now I feel like it's become way more mainstream. Right. And this whole idea of embryo screening has also become way more mainstream. Like I think, you know, in the last like six months alone, it's been like in like the New York Times, CNBC, GQ.
38:42It's like every major publication. It's on people's minds. It are talking about it and people are tweeting about it. And like these like these babies are getting not just like national, but like international coverage. So I think that's actually, yeah, it's like it's like it's shocking to see how fast that shift from like, oh, super sci fi movie to oh, like here's like, you know, you can go do it. Yeah, you can go do it. And it doesn't cost that much. It doesn't cost that much. And not only that, but it's like their friends are doing it. Right. And it's like, oh, I know someone like it's now like it's not just like people are doing it, but it's like I know someone who's in it or like I've met the I've met babies who were who were created this way.
39:20Right. Right. And I think that that kind of like familiarity really makes it much more concrete and tangible for people. But I think it also results in some of that outrage, too, because people are like, oh, my God, it's actually not just a movie now. It's like it's really happening. And yeah, that feeling of like, hey, this could actually be like the default way that people have babies in the future. And I think that people are, I think, starting to see around the corner of like, oh, that actually is, you know, what's likely because people want to know all this information before it actually hits them.
39:55If you look at any new technology, there's like first there's people that are like, oh, this is awesome. Then there's some people that are like, whoa, this is, you know, I don't want that type of future. I don't want to embrace it. But over time, it generally like trends towards people kind of forgetting about caring about it. And then they all just kind of like do the new thing. Yeah. Um, how has that kind of been with IVF in the first place and then like history of IVF and then also with us now, is it kind of like mirroring what's happened in the past? Yeah. Yeah. I think there's, um, there's always been these, uh, moral panics around every single reproductive technology.
40:27So, uh, I think a lot of people don't know that there was actually two different Supreme court cases that were fought over condoms, right. Over like women getting access to condoms. Yes. There's two different Supreme court cases. The first Supreme Court case was so that married women could get access to condoms. And then the second Supreme Court case was so that unmarried women could get access to condoms. So previously, before those cases, they were banned under obscenity laws. Right. It was considered obscene for a woman to be able to control like when she got pregnant. Right. So the idea of doctors giving out condoms was literally something that people were jailed for.
41:01Right. This is in the U.S. like less than 100 years ago. Right. Like so that was like the 1950s. 1950s. We're talking about 1965 and 1972, just for women to get access to condoms who are married and then till 72 to get access to condoms for unmarried women. Right. So it's like that it caused so much moral panic, so much consternation. It literally had to go to the Supreme Court to give women this right. So that's just condoms. Right. Then you think about IVF. IVF was met with pitchforks. There was calls for there was like insane moral panic around. Oh, these are test two babies. Then, you know, eventually these scientists, you know, won the Nobel Prize for, you know, inventing technology where now millions of babies have been born.
41:44The idea of the NICU itself, so the neonatal intensive care unit where babies who are preterm, the idea of spending money on that, there were a lot of doctors who were against that, who said that, hey, there's no way we can save these preterm babies. These dollars should be put elsewhere. Was this also like very recent in the last like 50, 60 years? Yes, there was a lot of doctors saying that we should not actually invest in preemies. Literally, right? Insane. Like the smallest, most vulnerable baby, we shouldn't try to save them. Insane, right? And epidural was met with a huge amount of, you know, moral concern.
42:20It was basically this idea that like women should feel pain during pregnancy because, you know, Eve fell from grace. They have different reasons for why. And then obviously there's none of that when you're in dentistry or when you're broken a limb. You should actually not use anesthesia when you're getting your teeth cleaned or getting a cavity because we want to feel it. They'll love the game. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So this idea of pain relief during pregnancy was also met with moral panic. C-sections were met with moral panic. I mean pretty much everything touching pregnancy, childbirth, babies.
42:55Think about it. Like people will hate you if you breastfeed, hate you if you don't breastfeed, right? It's sort of like every decision surrounding pregnancy is just, it just ends up. It's controversial. It ends up, somehow ends up, you know, causing a holy war, right? So it's not really surprising to me that, you know, people are so activated about embryo screening too. But I think it's just going to become something that's as normal as birth control pretty soon. I think that's going to be exciting. but there you know you have to just accept there's going to be this transition period where people are going to be uh we'll have to you know shake everything out and i think that's okay right the idea i mean it's not even just reproductive technology right like there was a huge amount of moral panic around switching from candles to electricity right there was a huge amount of moral panic around like people were genuinely afraid of elevator operators leaving they were like well what if the elevator stops what are we going to do where we can trust these buttons or not right and now obviously no one's concerned about not having elevator operators right but anytime there's like a big new technology, there's a lot of concern about, well, what is lost?
44:00What is gained? You know, are we, you know, gaining more? Are we losing more? Right? Like we used to, you know, hunt all of our own food, right? Now we go to the grocery store, right? Like now we don't have the same connection to meat as we used to when we were literally like, you know, spending, you know, weeks hunting, you know, a single deer, right? Like something was lost, but also something was gained right and i think that's that's obviously going to be true um for this as well right like when you go to the grocery store it's like this amazing uh selection of everything you could possibly want right like you know like you know our ancestors would be shocked they're like oh my gosh i only get this like once in my life and you have like every single variety like in all seasons flown in from like all around the world right um like low low prices of an hour of your labor or whatever and you get basically whatever you want from the grocery store yeah And then you could argue that, okay, you know, this surplus created like obesity or, you know, it's, you know, you're not having seasonal food.
44:53Yes, there are some downsides to the grocery store. But I mean, overall, what do we want to do? Do we want to ditch grocery stores, right? Like we used to suffer from, you know, the cold or the heat, right? And then we developed air conditioning in the US, right? Controversial for Europeans. And we had developed houses, right? But it's like we don't say like, oh, you know, God wanted us to freeze to death and not build a home for ourselves where, you know, we can be, you know, warm and safe in the winter. Right. So I think this is just yet another one of those things. Like, how can we use science and medicine so that, you know, the most precious moment in your life actually gets to be a healthy and happy one?
45:29Right. Like, I don't think there's like a better use of, yeah, science and tech than here because the impact is so big. When you when you started the company in the first place, did you kind of come into it with this understanding of like past technological trends and the pushback that those received? Or was it one of those things where you kind of come in, you start like offering, you know, do it to yourself and then you suggest it to your friends and all this stuff. And then you kind of over time start to hear people be mad. I didn't know about any of this actually before before Orkin. yeah so after orchid once i saw how activated people got i sort of was like huh is this something we're doing is this like a standard thing i got actually a lot more curious about it there's actually one um uh twitter account i really like it's called um i think pessimist archive or something have you seen that one yes where they basically talk about basically all of the haters for every great technology they basically talk about all the people who like didn't want the moon mission to happen or didn't want like the human genome project who like thought the golden gate bridge could get built like all the haters and it's like pessimists like don't get stuff done right like you kind of have to be an optimist to like want them to succeed and it's just like um but yeah there's always be like naysayers and you know sometimes was that difficult to like it for your own experience starting the company and starting to have people react in that way was that like difficult emotionally from just yeah it actually really was at the beginning it was actually extremely difficult emotionally because I thought um because I think I lived in like I would say a small bubble you know of people at like Stanford and San Francisco who were all like I don't know just much more like positive about it and I think I was just very ignorant to like you know how much activism that everyone else was also going to be as supportive I don't think that I assumed that but I think I just I didn't um I always thought that like online I think I was just a little bit naive.
47:27Like when people talked about online hate, I kind of dismissed it because I was sort of like, okay, if someone's harassing you in real life, it's like something you can't really avoid, right? Someone starts yelling at me like, okay, I can like move, but like I still have to experience, you know, their verbal attack versus for online bullying. I was sort of like, well, but you're reading the mean comments. Like why would you want you to stop reading them? You know what I mean? it's almost like you're actively participating in bullying yourself right um but anyway so yes but once i actually kind of experienced it i was like oh wow okay this is like a pretty weird like you know what i mean like humans have probably never experienced like this amount this is a new thing for the you know for the idea of like a tribe of 200 people and if all 200 of them were mad at you that was probably very bad and so our brains really don't like people being unhappy with us yeah yeah yeah so i think um yeah it was kind of surprising i think the first time but um i think this isn't honestly unique to orchid i think anytime anyone does anything it's not even significant i wouldn't even say that anytime anyone does anything on the internet people seem to like have lots of crazy opinions about it right like someone you know apple like you know changes the font and like people are like super outraged right it's like Like, so it doesn't, I think that if you're going to, like, I don't know, I think just like as a participant, like in the internet today, if you're going to get really dissuaded about what you do based on like a random online mob, like you're not going to last long because the online mobs get mad about something significant or insignificant every single day, right?
49:03So I think when you put it in that context of like, oh, well, they also got mad about this like font change or this color change. 48 hours, 72 hours. And they'll forget about the next thing. It'll be the next thing. I don't know. I think that kind of helps with perspective. And I think the other thing is sort of, yeah, I think it's two things. It's one, people's outrage is like very, like, very cyclical, right? And the second thing is just from that historical perspective of like, okay, don't feel like, oh, this is like a just you thing. This is just like a standard thing that always happens to literally anything new.
49:37For the very first like IVF clinic that you guys signed on, that was just pure you going out and talk with them, correct? The very first case was me. So yes, I talked to them about me. But yeah, after that, all the additional cases were recruited by our patients, right? So like I basically talked to, you know, a bunch of friends and then some fraction of those people did it. And then they recruited, they started recruiting IVF centers as they started doing it themselves. Yeah. Crazy. Was that was that roughly or relatively easy once people started to like go into IVF centers and say, can you please use this?
50:12I want to screen everything. Was that a relatively easy sign on process or they push back? No, there was pushback. I mean, some people had to go to several IVF centers because people were like, hey, what is this new weird thing? Right. Like, yeah. So I think it kind of depended. Right. I mean, some some of the time people were sort of more open to it. if they kind of had a direct relationship with maybe one of our, you know, one of the clinicians that we worked with who's already used it, they're kind of, you know, maybe might be more open to it. But there's a lot of people who had to, you know, really be a bull in a china shop and kind of like run through walls and like really pressure test their IVF center and their doctor into, you know, trying it out for them.
50:53And, you know, then kind of the doctor flipped after that and they were like, oh, wow, like these reports are actually really amazing. And like, this is going to save me a bunch of time on this huge category of patients. Right. but like that initial first step of like just trying anything um it's really hard but so yeah i think it's um i think yeah we just ended up getting really lucky and fortunate that like our first users were just incredibly persistent and uh demanding patients who wouldn't take no for an answer and who said like no i want this you know for my family and i want this for my baby so um you're right because yeah because basically if our first users happened to be like more timid in some way than like the whole, yeah, it might, it might've never worked.
51:32Yeah. I would be curious, like is our healthcare company is like disincentivized from health and having healthy people because like if they have a bunch of rare diseases, they can sell them drugs. Yeah. So the thing that's really crazy is that like the rare disease in rare disease specifically, there's this huge incentive problem because each individual disease is too rare for a drug target to be profitable. So it doesn't actually make sense to even spend the money on R &D to even attempt to find a treatment, much less a cure. So that's something that I think is super sad. Gene therapies, I think, are really cool.
52:10So there actually was a gene therapy called Lexterna, the first ever that was approved in the US for my mom's condition. It cost over a million dollars per eye, and it actually doesn't even reverse the blindness. It just prevents it from progressing. So for someone like my mom who already had pretty advanced vision loss... It wasn't worth spending$2 million. And also, so the other thing is that the Lux Turner targeted one specific variant called RP65. There's actually thousands of different variants that cause RP. So if you didn't have that one specific variant, you weren't even able to benefit from the gene therapy.
52:42So a tiny fraction of people were even able to benefit from an extremely expensive treatment that also, again, doesn't reverse the vision loss, right? So it's actually, you know, we're kind of living in the dark ages when it comes to medicine, right? And a lot of these drugs, right, they might have like a 30 % or 35 % relative risk reduction, but you only get that relative risk reduction if you're perfectly adherent, right? So what does that mean? It means you're taking the drug reliably every single day, right? There's entire companies that are built around, you know, how do I, you know, convince people to actually take a drug every day, right?
53:21So this is like way more powerful than that, right? This is this idea that you, your child gets from, you know, just their genetics, this benefit of being much lower risk for disease, even more so than what you would get from taking a drug, one of the best, you know, drugs. So these are there's drugs that make over a billion dollars a year that only have a 30 to 35 percent relative risk reduction. Right. Which is and you can get more more than that with embryo selection from just five embryos. Right. So no side effects. Right. Because you already have multiple embryos and you had to choose one anyways.
53:56Right. Before you were making that decision just based on a beauty contest morphology or just based on really limited genetics. They were literally just eyeballing it. Micros. Yes. I mean, essentially. This one looks good. click. Yeah, they call it morphology. They say there's, you know, grading of embryos, but there's also been studies that show that if you rotate those images, then the same embryologist will rate that, will give, will give a different grading for that embryo, right? So there is this, yeah, there's, there's issues with like any sort of human visual grading system. Crazy. Yeah.
54:28But that was the best that we had at the time. And hey, it worked, right? It was better than nothing. It was better than nothing, right? It was, it was some like a, you know, additional factor, but now yeah, there's just so much more information. It's not just so much more information on the embryo, but it's also geneticists have cataloged over the last 20 years what the cause of thousands of different diseases are, right? Before, like, it's great. Like, okay, if you have, you know, all of this data, but you don't know what to do with it, it's not that useful, right? But it's like, we're now at this moment in history where both things have happened.
54:58Now we can finally collect all this data off of the embryo, which wasn't possible before ORCID. And then we We now actually know what to do with it because geneticists have sequenced millions of people and we now know, okay, this is a molecular cause of, you know... Some disease. ...so many different conditions. And then also, even for diseases where there's not a single molecular cause, we now know how to, you know, build models so that we can quantify risk for diseases that are kind of, you know, that involve many thousands of different genes at once. And I think that that's something that's really cool because, you know, like not smoking is like a really great life decision.
55:36But, you know, it sucks that there's this huge portion of risk that previously, you know, you're just stuck with it at birth that literally rolled on lucky dice. Exactly. And that has sometimes and for a lot of those a lot of the time, it's a dominating influence, right? Does it matter how like how how much you exercise? It doesn't matter how much how healthy you eat. You still have this. It's a chronic thing that you can't fix. Exactly. And being able to even minimize that risk or take it entirely off the table is like now something that's like a superpower that parents have. Let's end it on.
56:13What's the hardest thing you've overcome? dude i don't know man the weather's so good right now i can't think of like a beautiful day it's like a beautiful sunny day and you guys are just like here i'm like i can't think of anything negative right now i'm too positive of a person dude i feel like even if something bad happens then i'm like i don't know just like you know i mean it's like lifting weights it's like oh i got i got a muscle out of it like it's how is it bad like you know you're more jacked you're like a stronger person uh jeff bezos's mom had this line where he i guess like uh she said if jeff's unhappy wait five minutes it's just he has this like i guess just inability to be unhappy for any length of time he just continually he just gets happy and then just grinds really hard yeah i don't know yeah i don't know it's it's that's i don't i'm not trying to be dismissive but like i don't know this is like maybe i'm just being overly optimistic or something but like every hardship is an opportunity right like anything that's like really hard to do like just ends up being like a really good story later so it's not really a hardship right it's almost just like it's a cool story, right?
57:11Like, I don't know, there's been lots of things that were like hard building the company, but like, they were obviously good, right? Because in the end, like, everyone involved, like me and, you know, like, you know, this great team that we've put together, everyone becomes like, more solid, more stoic, smarter, because of it, right? Like, you have to get battle tested in order to, like, build anything great. So you got to like, I don't know, I feel like I've, maybe just like learned or something just like to have this attitude of like excitement toward any problem it's like okay cool like well we can solve it right because um i don't know it's like kind of like it's part of the fun right like if it's going to be super easy then it's very strange i recently like i've heard the the saying like if um if i knew how hard it was going to be i wouldn't have done it or something and i'm like i just don't agree with that like there's even if something's extremely difficult if it's going to be super worthwhile and like fulfilling to do like fuck yeah I want to go do it yeah no exactly it's it's actually I mean I hope I'm not like to like teenager about it or something but like it's almost like when someone says that you know you can't do anything or something's impossible like it gets you more excited you're like okay cool well you know if I prove them wrong then like I've you know um some heroes it gives you a quest yeah it gives you a quest yeah
From the publisher
Embryo screening, genetic diseases, moral panic around reproductive technology.