#35 - Noor Siddiqui

Balaji (0:00)

Noor, welcome to The Network State Podcast.

Noor Siddiqui (0:02)

Thank you so much for having me, Balaji, this is awesome.

Balaji (0:04)

Awesome, great. So I was thinking we could start by just giving you a review of what orchard is, what embryo screening is, maybe what DNA is, just very, very basic, so people don't know anything about this. And then also kind of what you're shipping. And let's get into the moral case, right? Why it's actually important that, you know, if you're on the left and you believe in my body, my choice, which I think you and I do, then obviously, you know, you're going to want that to extend to everything. And if you're on the right and you believe in deregulation, decentralization, you know, like allowing people basically a libertarian kind of view, then again, you should come to this, to such an idea that people's personal choices are their own business. And certainly a parent shouldn't be forced to do something that another parent or person wants them to do is not really involved in their relationship. So why don't we go start with the first part, and let's talk about the technology, and let's talk about the morality and then the society. So you got some slides? Got some visuals?

Noor Siddiqui (1:12)

So what ORCID is is it allows parents to protect their children in a way that hasn't been possible before. And what we're able to do is we're able to screen the entire genome of an embryo to scan for thousands of diseases that previously parents didn't have the chance to know about until after the child was born, after symptoms already developed, after a doctor has a really awful conversation with the parent that sort of ends with there's not much that we can do. So we basically give all of that information at the earliest possible stage when there is actually something that you can do, which is to transfer an embryo that's unaffected. So let's kind of start at the very beginning of the birds and the bees. How does an embryo actually form? So what is an embryo? An embryo is an egg plus a sperm.

Each egg and sperm are carrying 23 chromosomes. That combines to create a zygote, an embryo that grows. So you can actually see this is how an embryo develops over those five days that it grows in the lab. So what happens is that it divides into multiple cells. On day five, you have about 125 cells. Five of those cells are sampled from the outer membrane, which is called the trifecta derb, and those are the ones that are actually used in orchids analysis. So this process of actually biopsying or giving a haircut to embryos has actually been happening for over two decades. It's just that in that five cell biopsy that only has 30 picograms of DNA, historically, you haven't been able to get very much information off of that. You only got something called chromosome information, right? Which you can kind of think of as like chapters in a book versus what Orca is able to do is actually read every single letter, every single base in those chapters as opposed to just that.

Balaji (3:01)

Here's the thing. The thing is, this doesn't look, at the one or two or four or eight or 16 cell or whatever cell stage, it really doesn't look human, right? It is very much, you can decide, you take a continuous process and every ethosist and every person will have a different point on that process as to when it's a human being, right? But like probably most would agree that, well, actually, no, some wouldn't, that the sperm and egg are themselves, there's biblical injunctions against spilling one seed on the ground and so on and so forth, right? So if you think it's actually a quote human at the moment of an embryo, then you'll have one set of moral intuitions. And if you think it's not really a human then, but it might become a human three months or six months or whatever months from now, that's the whole termination debate or what have you.

Noor Siddiqui (3:55)

Yeah, I think-

Balaji (3:56)

It's important to put this on screen because that, well, you just put there, it really doesn't look like a human. If you told machine learning to ask, is that look like a human or not? It's not, it doesn't look like a human, right? And whether it looks like something is not everything, but it's something, in the sense of, it's a microscopic little cluster of cells that, you know, legal systems will differ based on whether or not you consider this to quote be a human or not, right? And many legal systems do not consider it to be a human.