Orchid
Article
Orchid is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between November 08, 2021 and August 11, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Orchid has 400 employees already and the locals are typically doubling their income”; “GP and Orchid both say their technology has improved since reporting these numbers”; “Orchid for smuggling a term for age into their Alzheimer’s predictor”. It most often appears alongside Herasight, SF, 23andMe.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: November 08, 2021
- Last seen: August 11, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Herasight (2 shared issues)
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- SF (2 shared issues)
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- 23andMe (1 shared issues)
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- 23andme (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- ACX Grants (1 shared issues)
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- Alex Young (1 shared issues)
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- Alzheimer’s disease risk stratification (1 shared issues)
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- America (1 shared issues)
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- anorexia (1 shared issues)
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- Antagonistic Pleiotropy (1 shared issues)
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- Anthropic (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Econ Americas interviewed (44-minute video) Guillermo Peña, [Orqueida ZEDE]'s Technical Secretary. He summarizes Honduras's recent political and economic history (and seems to believe things are getting better). Orchid has 400 employees already and the locals are typically doubling their income. They'll start exporting in January 2022. They'll invest $85 million over four years with 2,700 employees eventually. It's the largest greenhouse in Central America, exporting vegetables and flowers, over 160 hectares. While all three opposition parties are opposed to ZEDEs, Pena is pretty optimistic that the ZEDEs won’t be shut down, at least immediately, if the opposition wins the November election (see 35:25).
Inline links: interviewed
In 2023, Orchid Health entered the field. Unlike Genomic Prediction, which tested only the most important genetic variants, Orchid offers whole genome sequencing, which can detect the de novo3 mutations involved in autism, developmental disorders, and certain other genetic diseases.
Inline links: Orchid Health, 3
Critics accused GP and Orchid of offering “designer babies”, but this was only true in the weakest sense - customers couldn’t “design” a baby for anything other than slightly lower risk of genetic disease. These companies refused to offer selection on “traits” - the industry term for the really controversial stuff like height, IQ, or eye color. Still, these were trivial extensions of their technology, and everybody knew it was just a matter of time before someone took the plunge.
Herasight’s numbers on how breast cancer risk goes down with number of embryos used in selection. A typical round of IVF produces 1-10 embryos (younger women usually = more). Women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (prevalence: 10%) may get as many as 20. For more, you will probably need to do multiple IVF rounds. Here is a table of different companies’ reported risk reductions, slightly adjusted7 for different reporting conventions but otherwise taking all claims at face value (we’ll talk about how wise that is later). Relative risk reduction for five conditions (gray = no data / disputed data). Here baseline is for embryos neither of whose parents have the condition. GP and Orchid both say their technology has improved since reporting these numbers and they will report better numbers soon. GP numbers are not within-family validated and might be lower if they were. Absolute risk after selection for five conditions (gray = no data / disputed data), ibid. Some people might genuinely want to select on a single condition. For example, people with a strong family history of schizophrenia might want to minimize the chance of their children getting the disease; for these people, reducing schizophrenia risk by 58% (while keeping everything else constant) sounds pretty good. Everyone else probably wants a generically healthy embryo with low risk of all conditions. Exactly how this works depends on the customer’s own values - would they prefer an embryo with lower cancer risk to one who will have fewer heart attacks? - and the exact benefits will depend on how parents make that decision. Genomic Prediction and Herasight try to help by providing semi-objective measures of which embryo is overall healthiest according to different conditions’ effects on longevity and patient-rated quality of life. For Genomic Prediction, that’s the “embryo health score” If you selected the single highest-health-score embryo from a set of five, here’s how they’d do: For Herasight, it’s a “polygenic longevity index”. They don’t give exact risk reduction numbers for each disease, saying that it depends too much on a couple’s specific family history, but say that most people gain 1-4 years of healthy life (when I test it on a set of twenty embryos, the the healthiest gets an extra 1.66 years). How much would you pay to give your children an extra 1-4 years of healthy life? This is no longer a hypothetical question. Here are the costs of the companies in this space: Is it worth it? If: You’re already doing IVF
Inline links: 7, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0oUh!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe8419603-9239-43bb-8c79-77b078ff0789_548x136.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rpEJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc539a717-a130-460d-90c9-4ab64619f26d_548x133.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!3Kc6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbda325bb-13fb-4c27-b8c3-24facce5c71a_676x153.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!t1Am!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F831ab3c6-4053-4ff9-bc2f-879aee4349cf_673x740.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Q2vE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fadcf2bb4-8dd1-4a88-9728-6953a820971b_422x575.png
4: In the post on embryo selection, I mentioned that Herasight criticized Orchid's Alzheimer's predictor. A representative of Orchid reached out to say they stood by their methodology:
Inline links: the post on embryo selection, criticized
Herasight seems to be misreading our whitepaper. The “Performant Alzheimer’s disease risk stratification” section is meant to show the kind of performance patients can expect—people in the top 5% have an OR of 5.80, top 3% is 7.35, and top 1% is 11.69. This odds ratio is what is used to present embryo disease risk to patients and does not include covariates. The “Comparison to Published Benchmarks” section is just about comparing our models to others in the literature. To allow a head to head comparison, we used the same metric (AUC) and covariates as the paper we’re comparing against. However, to avoid future confusion, we’ve just added a sentence clarifying the AUC without covariates (0.724).
Inline links: our whitepaper