Six Sigma and Sex: It’s a Bird; It’s a Plane; It’s Super Baby!

Silicon Valley technophiles don't mind a little killing on their merry way to Utopia. Guest Editorial by Jeffery J. Ventrella

Aug 15, 2025

**Jeffery J. Ventrella**, Ph.D., J.D., is Visiting Professor of Law, Trinity Law School; Executive Director of TruthXChange Fellowship, Escondido, California; and architect of the Blackstone Legal Fellowship of the Alliance Defending Freedom, Scottsdale, Arizona

“A group of well-heeled, 30-something women [seek to] optimize their offspring.”
“Sex is for fun, and embryo screening is for babies”
“[Emerging] innovations [will] ‘accelerate civilizational progress.’”

Silicon Valley’s moguls, with their penchant for creating wealth by “moving fast and breaking things” now has designs for a little more ambitious endeavor: Improving humanity genetically by manufacturing super babies. They are moving fast and using their ruthless reliance on data-mining to produce the ultimate product — made-to-order children with more brains and less disease — and in the process breaking things, actually breaking lots of things, things we call people.

The Brand Promise: Genetically Blessed Children!

Welcome to the latest Silicon Valley-funded “let’s play God” gambit: polygenic person screening. Orchid Health, led by Noor Siddiqui, stands at the vanguard of so-called fertility startups funded by tech investors. And, why not, if you’ve got money to burn? After all, the logic goes: Tech is really about acquiring, analyzing, and manipulating data into usable forms; data make life’s decisions better; so why not use data-mining for planning — and designing — a family? And, in the process, improve humanity by promising elevated intelligence in — and eliminating pesky genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis from — the human gene pool.

Reproduction in tech-land becomes “not an outcome of sex but of genetic preselection and data-mining.” Good-bye candy, candlelight, and cuddling; hello spreadsheets, science, and syringes. The next generation’s existence, if we listen to these Silicon Valley elites, should now rest upon, and be subject to, supply-chain management, quality assurance procedures, and product delivery timetables — a merger of Six-Sigma and sex — all reduced to and specified on spreadsheets. So hip, so trendy.

And so massively deadly.

How It Works: Choose Me! - And Forget My Siblings!

This entire embryo-screening enterprise functions within and requires the IVF universe. This means the subjects of these scientific screening techniques are frozen humans who came into being from Petrie dishes. For years, IVF users poked and tested their embryonic children for diseases caused by single gene mutations like Down Syndrome or Cystic Fibrosis. Why test? So as to avoid parenting THOSE types of children, making the implicit judgment that some lives are not worth living, or loving.

The Self-Satisfying Ethic: Kill Rather than Care

What happens to those young ones with bad genes? At best they stay frozen until they rot, or at worst they serve as scientific experiments, or are simply discarded — like chucking a carton of old Chow Mein. By such techniques, some countries have eliminated Down syndrome: by eliminating Down children.

Orchid Heath now raises the stakes. It claims its technology can sequence the genome of 3 billion DNA pairs. This reaches far beyond standard genetic testing. Orchid using algorithms to produce polygenetic “risk scores” — these are not definite markers identifying actual diseases or conditions. Rather, these are statistical conjectures and projections forecasting the propensity of the embryonic person to develop things like “bipolar disorder, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, obesity and schizophrenia.” Orchid’s founder gushed in a tweet: Orchid is ushering in “a generation that gets to be genetically blessed and avoid disease.” This promises a hassle-free and problem-free life, unencumbered by the grace of suffering. It also casts a utopian vision, a society increasingly populated with Übermensch or supermen. Nietzsche coined this term to describe the ultimate goal of humanity — without God of course. Hitler and the Nazis instantiated this notion to its own logical end: The Holocaust.

All this “better society” for a price: at a mere cost of $2500 per-embryo screening and add to this the cost of a single IVF cycle — $20,000 — and one can see why it’s currently a toy, albeit a deadly one, for the Silicon Valley fiscal elites.

So much for Utopia’s trade-off: Supposedly more big brains; certainly more dead bodies.

Siddiqui intends to “have” – or more accurately put – keep four children; however, she’s already produced 16 persons via IVF and intends to manufacture more. Hmmm. What happens to those NOT selected for implantation???? They die. That’s the actual verifiable algorithmic outcome. She intends to exterminate at least 75% (12 of 16) of her children. They are essentially crafted to be killed, if their genetic propensities project possible disfavored outcomes. But this fits Silicon Valley’s techno-ethos. These “innovators” are:

“[C]omfortable with a brave new world of probabilistic, data-driven medical decision-making, and can afford the extra costs to give their children a genetic edge.”

This means people will increasingly “choose their embryos [children] by spreadsheet.” But what about life choices which are inherently sterile, like homosexuality? Technology to the rescue! Yet, we need to ask: at what cost and who bears the burden? Consider this:

[Billionaire Peter] Thiel has funded the egg-freezing robotics start-up TMRW, launched a $200 million fund to bring fertility services to Asia and bankrolled a family planning app connected to a right-wing magazine. The investor, who is gay, has recently become a father to four children through IVF and surrogacy . . .”

Somehow renting the wombs of poverty-stricken Asian women doesn’t seem like it really provides them their “best life now.” But Orchid Health’s Siddiqui wraps her venture with the language of “human rights,” claiming that having “a healthy child should be considered a basic human right.” Hmmm — and what about the scores of allegedly “defective” humans frozen who hang in suspended animation? What about their basic human rights? Consigning innocent political prisoners to frozen Siberia sparks protests and outrage. Putting innocent embryonic children in deep freeze sparks profits and genetic “progress.” Doesn’t the Constitution somewhere prohibit involuntary servitude?

Screening for defects lacks a logical limiting principle. If technology can identify the “bad genes,” why not use it to identify the “good ones,” especially for higher intelligence? Peter Thiel is doing exactly that with another start up called Nucleus — the idea is to provide intelligence predictions to “enhance their children’s prospects.” Of course this is not, we are assured, “eugenics,” but rather “genetic enhancement.” The ease by which the investors justify this monkey business is stunning: “When you choose your married partner, you’re using a form of eugenics,” Delian Asparouhov, a partner of Theil’s quipped. He continued:

When your kids are older, you invest in tutors and great schools. What’s the harm in using a tool that allows you to amplify that type of effect?

For a tech savvy smart guy, Mr. Asparouhov seems oblivious to his false analogy. Providing tutors and private school for one of your children does not kill your other children; embryo screening necessarily does so. So, there is no harm for screening embryos, so long as one doesn’t consider killing the vulnerable harmful. So much for Utopia’s trade-off: Supposedly more big brains; certainly more dead bodies.

As Molnar demonstrated decades ago, Utopia is the perennial heresy. The pagan pursuit of perfection — by playing God without God — always worships on the altar of death; while promising a better life for “the people,” real persons die.

Sorry Nietzsche, there are no Supermen; we should stop promising to make them.

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