Upstream with Erik Torenberg

“Within one generation, we have the ability to slash incidence rates for so many major diseases.” @noor_siddiqui_'s company @OrchidInc recently announced their whole genome sequencing capabilities for embryos. Noor and @ErikTorenberg discuss this technology and more on @Upstream__Pod. Orchid’s capabilities "We had this pretty badass accomplishment last week… which is that we built the world's first whole genome sequencing for embryos. Embryos historically have had very little information. You sequence a really, really small segment of the genome of an embryo, less than 1%, versus what Orchid is able to do is sequence 99%. So over a hundred times the amount of data on an embryo. The analogy that I like to use is a table of contents versus reading the entire book." Eliminating rare genetic diseases "I'm just insanely excited about it because within one generation, we have the ability to slash incidence rates for so many major diseases. Right now in the U. S. there are 30 million people with a rare disease... They're individually rare… but in aggregate, they're really common. If you add up all these people, 30 million people, 10 percent of Americans have this rare genetic disorder where there's this orphan drug problem where drug companies have no incentive to design a gene therapy or really any treatment for these people… With Orchid… you have the ability to avoid all of these thousands of catastrophic diseases at once." On IVF "Yeah, IVF is so cool… The first time I went to an IVF lab I thought it was the coolest thing ever. You literally come there, and this is a place where they make humans, right? Millions of people owe their existence to IVF… IVF is like traditionally used to treat infertility... Most people want to have kids later in life. I think the average age of a first time mother in San Francisco is 33 or something like that. And a geriatric pregnancy is 35, right? The condition for everyone is to become infertile over time. And as we've pushed the age where we want to have kids later and later, the set of people who have some sort of fertility issue happens earlier and earlier… My… hot take is just that sex is for fun and IVF is for babies in the future, right?" On the bullied founder stereotype "…Sometimes people celebrate these super pathological and traumatic childhoods of founders, right? Elon was famously bullied, and a lot of really successful founders were. They just got used to their life being really hard from birth to them that starting companies became easy because it wasn't any change… There's almost this weird cultishness and support of trauma because it makes it so that people can create these amazing empires, right? …The unhealthy view that is propagated is, if you just were well-loved and had a happy, well-adjusted childhood, you don't have enough of a chip on your shoulder, you don't have enough of an insecurity, you don't have enough of a pain tolerance to make anything truly new and exceptional, because the only people who want to do that have something to to prove, or just are are used to not being satisfied."