THE BABY BLUEPRINT

Genomics startups like Orchid promise healthier children through advanced embryo screening. Do they deliver?

- AINSLEY HARRIS

By the time my son arrived in the world, both of us dazed and red-faced after laboring through the night in a hospital room, I had already started telling myself his origin story.

IT HAD BEGUN NEARLY TWO YEARS PRIOR, WITH A miscarriage, and then another. I was compiling a list of fertility clinics when he made an appearance on the ultrasound monitor, a flickering response to my quietly brewing despair.

I spent the long months of pregnancy that followed feeling like a cartoon character with a me-size thunderstorm threatening at every turn. Though my pregnancy was healthy, I was convinced I had to remain vigilant until my son was in my arms. When my husband and I visited my obstetrician nine days past my son’s due date, I wasn’t surprised to see an irregularity in his heartbeat. Less than an hour later, we were checking into the hospital to start my induction. Later that night, my son’s heartbeat dropped again, prompting a small army of doctors and nurses to rush the delivery room. But he recovered, my body stopped resisting, and then it was over. We sat together in the emptied room, my son curled against my husband’s chest, his tiny hat askew. Here was my family.

Do our beginnings matter? It’s the question at the heart of Orchid, one of a new wave of companies performing genomic screening on human embryos. Roughly 40% of in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycles today include genetic screening, but in almost all cases, the tests are a relatively rudimentary gauge of obvious chromosomal abnormalities, with results similar in scope to a prenatal amniocentesis test. Orchid and its competitors, all of which were founded within the last decade, assess embryo health in a far more comprehensive, and potentially more radical, way.