What if you could read the DNA of your future child? | Noor Siddiqui

Elise Hu (0:03)

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. For all of human history, a baby's DNA has been determined by chance at conception, the so-called genetic lottery.

Noor Siddiqui (0:17)

For 300,000 years, every parent in human history handed their child a genetic hand they'd never seen. There was no way to know what was in it, no way to prepare, and no way to choose health. The genetic lottery ran, and you got what you got.

That era is over.

Elise Hu (0:37)

That's reproductive technology researcher Noor Siddiqui. Her company Orchid builds screening tools to read the whole genome of embryos. It's in an effort to give parents more genetic information than standard IVF. It's an idea that excites some people and deeply worries others.

Noor is an advocate for it, and her own motivation is personal.

Noor Siddiqui (0:59)

I grew up watching my mom go blind.

It took years just to get the diagnosis. And after all the testing and all the office visits and all the uncertainty, the answer was, there's nothing we can do.

Elise Hu (1:14)

In her talk, Noor makes the case that this technology can help families understand and reduce health risks before a child is born. But the implications for ethics, for access, for how far this should go, are profound and far from settled. That's coming up next. And stick around after the talk for a brief conversation between Noor and TED's vision steward, Sal Khan. All this right after a short break.

And now our TED Talk of the Day.

Noor Siddiqui (1:47)

For 300,000 years, every parent in human history handed their child a genetic hand they'd never seen. There was no way to know what was in it, no way to prepare, and no way to choose health. The genetic lottery ran, and you got what you got.

That era is over, and the way that we have babies is changing forever. But before we get into that, I want to start with you and how you got here. You began as two cells, an egg and a sperm, each carrying 23 chromosomes. When that egg and sperm met, sparks literally flew. A burst of zinc emerged to start your life, and this specific moment locked in your entire genetic destiny. Your mother produced two million eggs, your father produced over 500 billion sperm, and the specific combination of egg and sperm that make up you is a one in a trillion chance. The odds of you existing at all are about the same as picking one specific grain of sand out of all the grains of sand on all the beaches on the entire planet. You were wildly unlikely to exist at all. A different night, a different day, and it wouldn't have been you. Yet, tucked inside that miracle for hundreds of millions of people is a genetic disease waiting to take something from them. Their heart, their sight, their child.

Something that will arrive regardless of how loved they are or how hard they fight.

I grew up watching my mom go blind.

It took years just to get the diagnosis. And after all the testing and all the office visits and all the uncertainty, the answer was, there's nothing we can do.

She lost her night vision first, then her peripheral vision, and then finally and slowly her central vision too.

It sucks to be powerless. It sucks to watch someone you love so much lose something so precious. And unfortunately, she's not alone. 400 million people around the world suffer from genetic disease. That's more than the entire population of the United States. Half of those people that are affected are children.

95 percent of those don't have an FDA-approved treatment. Scientists have now cataloged over 3,000 genetic diseases. You can't pronounce most of them. You don't know their names. But the people who are affected, who are living it day in and day out, they wouldn't wish it on their worst enemies. I started Orchid because of my mom.

I still can't accept the fact that she's not going to be able to see her grandkids' faces because of a random genetic typo in her DNA.

I built this because I don't want my own kids to be stuck with their life getting hijacked by a random genetic typo.

We are the first company in the world to be able to sequence the entire genome of an embryo created during IVF. A round of IVF creates anywhere from 5 to 15 embryos. And today, that incredibly critical decision is made either by a beauty contest, what these embryos look like under a microscope, or they're made with a tiny slice of genetic information that's actually available. They zoom in on the specific chromosome, are both chromosomes present or not. If they're missing, it'll let you know.