HOW TO MAKE A SUPERBABY

Noor Siddiqui says her company can test embryos for hundreds of conditions from diabetes to Alzheimer's. Critics call it social engineering but she insists she's just giving prospective parents the means to avoid a lot of future heartache

- HELENA DE BERTODANO

ALTHOUGH Noor Siddiqui and her husband have no fertility problems, she’s undergone IVF so that she can freeze her embryos. Then, using the technology of her own startup company, Orchid, she’s pre-screening each embryo for any potential health problems.

Noor (29) doesn’t have children yet, nor is she even pregnant, but she knows a lot about her future family. She’ ll have two sons and two daughters and, like any parent, she wants them all to be healthy.

Unlike most parents, however, she’s almost guaranteed to get what she wants.

We’re not talking about simply screening for major birth defects or conditions such as Down syndrome – what Noor’s company offers is a full-scale analysis of each embryo’s predisposition towards all the 1 200-plus diseases and conditions about which we currently have genetic information, including a wide range of cancers, diabetes, coronary artery disease and even Alzheimer’s.

Based on the results, prospective parents can decide which embryos to implant. Testing costs $2 500 (R45 000) per embryo – on top of the cost of IVF – leading to concerns that the wealthy will breed “superbabies”.

The difference between the Orchid testing – which is already available in dozens of clinics across the US – and what Noor refers to as “the old testing” is off the charts. She suggests you think of it “like a book”. “The old testing is only looking at the table of contents, [whereas Orchid] is spellchecking the entire book. So if your genome is three billion letters, Orchid is looking at all of them.

“Look,” Noor says, pointing to a graph she’s pulled up on her iPhone that shows the analysis of one of her embryos.

“All these genes that cause horrible diseases are all negative. Same for hereditary cancer.”

She flicks to another one and I see a solid red line. What’s that?

“This embryo was in the 99th percen