Noor Siddiqui

On June 12, 2012, VentureBeat published the newest fellows of the Thiel Fellowship, which Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry had set up the year before and which was then in its second year, and she was on the list (16th fellow). The list gives her hometown as Clifton, VirginiaVirginiaVirginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state whose capital is Richmond. It entered the Union on June 25, 1788, as the 10th state, and had a population of 8,631,393 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, and her age as 17, and says she is “inspired to galvanize people for the good of others”; as a Thiel Fellow she planned to give students around the world access to upward mobility and industries access to an untapped workforce, with the goal of mobilizing one billion people in the next decade. TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry’s list of the same class, published on June 14, 2012, also includes her with the same goal.⁠[1][2]

On June 28, 2012, a photo caption in The Connection, a local newspaper in Virginia, gave her age as 18 and called her one of the youngest fellows of the program for people under 20. A Clifton native, she had just graduated from high school and had declined offers from Brown UniversityBrown UniversityBrown University is a private nonprofit research university in Providence, Rhode Island, and a member of the Ivy League. Chartered by Rhode Island's colonial legislature in 1764, it is known for its undergraduate Open Curriculum, which has no common required core. Christina H. Paxson, president since July 2012, announced on August 3, 2026, that the 2026–27 academic year would be her last in office. As of October 1, 2026, the search for Brown's 20th president remained underway.Open the full entry and the University of Chicago. She said she was “very humbled, thrilled, and surprised” to have been selected, and: “I didn't tell my parents before I applied.” She wanted to change how the world responds to persistent poverty, a passion that came from a recent trip to Pakistan where she saw poverty at first hand: “You see people who are very much like yourself, very capable and motivated but they just need to be empowered.” Her plans at the time included exploring commercial surrogacy, creating alternative education models and expanding on mobile technology, and she said she would measure success not in dollars but by the number of people she could help succeed.⁠[3]

Helena de Bertodano’s 2024 interview likewise relates that as a teenager she applied, without her parents’ knowledge, to the program, which funds 20 young people a year to defer college, and won a place. MercuryMercury (fintech company)Mercury is an American fintech company founded in 2017 by Immad Akhund, Jason Zhang and Max Tagher; it launched account services for businesses in 2019. Its platform combines financial services provided by partner banks with software for bills, invoices and expense management. Mercury itself remains a fintech company; the proposed Mercury Bank, N.A. should be distinguished from the current partner-bank model.Open the full entry’s 2024 profile and Upstarts Media’s 2026 episode notes both say she became a Thiel Fellow at 17; Mercury describes the award as a two-year, $100,000 grant from Peter Thiel to skip traditional college and build something of her own, and Upstarts Media writes that she then moved to the Bay Area to be around other startup founders. The Computer History Museum’s profile gives her years as a Thiel Fellow as 2012–2014. A 2014 article in Silicon Republic, by contrast, says that at 19 she decided to forgo college for a Thiel Fellowship.⁠[4][5][6][7][8]

On The Upstarts Podcast in 2026 she described what the experience had given her: “The license to actually do the thing, and to have seen it go sideways for people, and be successful for people.”⁠[6]

Remedy was founded by two sisters, Noor and Gina Siddiqui, a Thiel Fellow and a medical student, Noor Siddiqui being the former. Remedy built an app for Google Glass with companion desktop software: physician assistants could use voice commands to take photos and videos of patients and share them with on-call surgeons instead of only describing patients over the phone, and the desktop software synced the material into case-management software so that doctors could review a patient’s photos, video and data together. The founders found that doctors did not want “Minority Report”-style heads-up visuals of vital signs but wanted quick access to photos and case data.⁠[9]

Remedy was piloted at three HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry-affiliated hospitals in the Boston area, covering 25 cases, eight surgeons and six physician assistants, and 91 percent of the surgeons found it useful for managing patient treatment; in one case a surgeon using Remedy overruled a physician assistant’s diagnosis and the patient was rushed into surgery. She said: “The fact that people are actually changing what they're doing is pretty incredible,” and said that all the patients in the pilot were comfortable with providers photographing or filming them with Google Glass.⁠[9]

The Computer History Museum’s profile describes Remedy as a digital health company that connected doctors with specialists for quick answers; the episode page of Progress Studies for Aspiring Young Scholars states that Remedy was deployed to doctors and nurses at Harvard-affiliated hospitals; Helena de Bertodano’s interview says that Remedy used GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry’s augmented reality glasses to help healthcare providers care for patients.⁠[7][10][4]

From November 4 to 7, 2014, she attended Web Summit in Dublin; aged 20, she was interviewed there by Elaine Burke as co-founder and CEO of Remedy, and the interview was published by Silicon Republic on November 6, 2014. She had founded Remedy with her sister Gina; the idea came from what she had seen in hospitals, where patients waited weeks for specialist consultations and doctors handled stacks of paper charts. Remedy used wearable and mobile platforms such as Google Glass so that physicians at the point of care could send patient information to specialists elsewhere and get specialist input faster; in her view, answering medical queries should be as easy as catching an UberUberUber is a technology company headquartered in San Francisco, United States, whose legal name is Uber Technologies, Inc. Co-founded by Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, it uses digital platforms to connect riders with drivers, delivery consumers with merchants, and shippers with carriers, with main businesses in Mobility, Delivery, and Freight. Dara Khosrowshahi has been chief executive officer since 2017.Open the full entry.⁠[8][11]

In the interview she said that young innovators are driven not by money but because they “want to solve really big problems,” and that she wanted to transform healthcare, education and government, the areas she saw as most in need of innovation.⁠[8]

At Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry she founded the #nofilter speaker series. The series’ website gives 2016 as its founding year and lists her as founder; it invites CEOs, creatives and coders to candid, unrecorded conversations, with a strict no-screens policy, four events a quarter, held in the Gates Computer Science building at Stanford. Past speakers listed on the site include Daphne KollerDaphne KollerDaphne Koller is an Israeli-born computer scientist and entrepreneur who taught for many years at Stanford University and is known for her work on probabilistic graphical models and her 2004 MacArthur Fellowship. She co-founded Coursera with Andrew Ng in 2012 and in 2018 founded insitro, a machine-learning-driven drug discovery company she leads as CEO.Open the full entry, Elad GilElad GilElad Gil is an entrepreneur, investor and author of High Growth Handbook. He co-founded Mixer Labs and Color, worked at Google and Twitter, runs the multistage investment firm Gil & Co, and co-hosts the No Priors podcast with Sarah Guo.Open the full entry, Balaji SrinivasanBalaji SrinivasanBalaji Srinivasan is an entrepreneur, investor and the author of The Network State, the founder of Network School, and a former chief technology officer of Coinbase and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He co-founded Counsyl and 21, along with its successor product Earn.com, was involved in projects such as Coin Center, and has backed companies such as fomo as an angel investor.Open the full entry, Greg BrockmanGreg BrockmanGreg Brockman is a software engineer and entrepreneur, co-founder and president of OpenAI, and a former chief technology officer of Stripe. His work spans payment infrastructure, engineering organizations and large AI systems, alongside public discussion of AI development and governance.Open the full entry, Laura DemingLaura DemingLaura Deming is a biotechnology venture capitalist and entrepreneur who founded The Longevity Fund in 2011 to invest in longevity and age-related disease companies, co-founded its successor fund age1, and co-founded Until Labs (formerly Cradle), which develops reversible cryopreservation technology, with Hunter Davis, serving as its CEO.Open the full entry, Derek Muller and Stephen Hsu.⁠[12][13]

She organized talks at Stanford on entrepreneurship, genomics, blockchain and computer science.⁠[7]

In spring 2019 Stanford University offered for the first time the student-initiated course CS 17si, “Frontiers in Reproductive Technology,” with her as organizer and holder of office hours and Russ Altman as faculty sponsor; the guest lecturers listed on the course website include Stanford reproductive endocrinologists and infertility physicians, embryologists and a stem-cell biologist, as well as Danny Desloover of Color Genomics. Her personal website and Mercury’s profile also mention that she taught this course on reproductive technology at Stanford.⁠[14][13][5]

Upstarts Media’s 2026 episode notes give 2019 as Orchid’s founding year; the portfolio page of the investment firm Pebblebed gives 2020 and states that Pebblebed invested in Orchid in 2022. Upstarts Media writes that she notes the irony that she went on to Stanford and then had to be encouraged by an investor, who is not named, to drop out to start Orchid.⁠[6][15]

Sources give the company’s early name in slightly different forms: the July 2020 episode page of Progress Studies for Aspiring Young Scholars calls her the founder and CEO of “Orchid Bioscience,” and a Scientific American article calls it “a CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry-based start-up called Orchid Biosciences.”⁠[10][16]

She has repeatedly linked the founding of Orchid to her mother’s experience. Mercury’s profile states that her mother lost her vision to retinitis pigmentosa, a rare degenerative condition, which shaped her focus on giving her own child the best chance at health; Helena de Bertodano’s interview relates that her mother’s diagnosis of retinitis pigmentosa and worsening vision sparked her interest in genetics; on The Upstarts Podcast in 2026 she recounted the story of her mother’s blindness, saying “I just thought that was insanely unfair,” and spoke of wanting to keep the condition from being passed to the next generation.⁠[5][4][6]

Her husband, Feross Aboukhadijeh, was a fellow student at Stanford and later became founder and CEO of Socket SecuritySocket (software supply chain security)Socket is a San Francisco-based software supply chain security company founded by open-source developer Feross Aboukhadijeh; its products detect and block malicious open-source packages before they enter a codebase.Open the full entry. After eight years of dating she organized a flashmob proposal and he proposed back with a scavenger hunt; she got engaged shortly after graduating from Stanford, and they married in 2022 at a three-day wedding in HawaiiHawaiiHawaii is a U.S. state consisting of a group of volcanic islands in the central Pacific Ocean; its capital is Honolulu, on the island of Oʻahu. Hawaii was admitted to the Union on August 21, 1959, as the 50th state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 1,455,271.Open the full entry.⁠[4][5]

On December 5, 2023, Orchid launched a whole-genome sequencing report for embryos, which the company called the first commercially available one; it is intended for couples undergoing IVF and screens for birth defects, neurodevelopmental disorders, chromosomal abnormalities, and pediatric and adult-onset cancers; the company said the report covers more than 99 percent of an embryo’s genome, compared with about 0.25 percent for existing tests. Sequencing cost $2,500 per embryo, which she said added no steps or risks to IVF; results took about three weeks, with a board-certified genetic counselor helping to interpret them. The report was first offered at IVF clinics in major cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and Austin. She said the test brought “a lot more control and confidence” to a process that had “just been totally left to chance.”⁠[17]

By then Orchid had secured $12 million in funding from investors such as Prometheus Fund and Refactor Capital, with other backers including Anne Wojcicki, co-founder and CEO of 23andMe23andMe23andMe is a consumer genetics and research brand offering ancestry and health-risk services. It is now operated by 23andMe Research Institute, a nonprofit based in Palo Alto, California.Open the full entry; Dylan FieldDylan FieldDylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma and an angel investor. He studied computer science and mathematics at Brown University, explored browser-based design tools with Evan Wallace, and founded Figma in 2012 with support from the Thiel Fellowship. His personal history also includes collecting digital art and investing in companies such as Mercury and Socket.Open the full entry, co-founder and CEO of Figma; Fidji SimoFidji SimoOpenAI advisor and Nscale director.Open the full entry, then CEO of Instacart; and Brian ArmstrongBrian ArmstrongBrian Armstrong is an American entrepreneur and the co-founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of the crypto asset trading platform Coinbase. He founded Coinbase in 2012, led the company to a direct listing on Nasdaq in 2021, and holds a majority of its voting power through a dual-class share structure; he also founded the scientific collaboration platform ResearchHub and co-founded the longevity research company NewLimit.Open the full entry, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase.⁠[17]

Orchid’s report screens for variants linked to more than 1,200 monogenic disorders and flags an embryo’s risk of polygenic disorders; the company had posted a paper on bioRxiv validating its embryo sequencing technique, and as of December 2023 had not shown that the information leads to healthier pregnancies or babies; it expected the cost of its reports to fall as it scaled.⁠[18]

Mercury and Helena de Bertodano both write in 2024 that the first baby born with Orchid’s help arrived late in 2023; the latter says the parents were a San Francisco couple.⁠[5][4]

She hosts Orchid’s podcast Conceivable with Noor, running since 2024, with in-depth conversations with experts in fields such as AI, genetics and reproductive technology about technologies and ideas likely to change the world and how they might support healthier, happier and more fulfilling lives; the show’s page gives the number of episodes as 19, and the earliest of the episodes it lists is dated February 20, 2025. The show is available on SpotifySpotifySpotify is an audio streaming subscription service offering on-demand music, podcasts, and audiobooks through a free ad-supported service and a paid Premium subscription. Its parent company, Spotify Technology S.A., is incorporated in Luxembourg, has its principal operations in Stockholm, Sweden, and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker SPOT). It helped move the recorded-music business from buying and owning music to on-demand streaming and is one of the largest audio streaming subscription services by users.Open the full entry, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music.⁠[19]

On August 27, 2024, Mercury published a profile of her by Shreeda Segan. She had recently created 16 embryos through IVF and had not yet implanted any; neither she nor her husband had a fertility issue. At Stanford she had worked as an AI researcher; she said she had worked in a number of AI labs on applications of deep learning.⁠[5]

At the time Orchid’s test read nearly the whole genome of an embryo (about 99 percent, against under 1 percent for traditional screening) and checked more than 1,200 known disease-causing variants, using just five cells from a five-day-old embryo of about 125 cells; it cost $2,500 per embryo on top of IVF costs that can exceed $20,000 per cycle, and was available at more than 70 IVF clinics in the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry. She said: “IVF is a place where people vote with their feet,” and said that Orchid owed its success to customers choosing an IVF clinic based on whether Orchid is available there.⁠[5]

Air Mail’s issue of September 6, 2024, carried Helena de Bertodano’s interview with her (credited to The Times). She was 29, had no children and was not pregnant, and she and her husband planned to start a family within the next couple of years; she had no fertility problems but had undergone IVF to freeze embryos for screening, and had frozen 16 embryos, almost all girls, one of the two boys having a heightened risk of prostate cancer; she was going to freeze more eggs that September and planned to decide which embryos to implant after her second round of IVF. She said the process was “really not an ordeal,” called Orchid her “life’s work,” and said: “It’s the parents who decide; I don’t decide anything.”⁠[4]

Orchid charges $2,500 per embryo, on top of IVF costs, to analyze predisposition to more than 1,200 diseases and conditions, including several cancers, diabetes, coronary artery disease and Alzheimer’s disease; she compared older chromosome-only tests to reading the table of contents and Orchid’s test to “spellchecking the entire book.” As an example, she said the test can show a 37 percent lifetime risk of breast cancer for one embryo against 18 percent for another. At the time Orchid was available in dozens of clinics across the United States, was developing a way to predict whether a future child may be predisposed toward addiction, and planned a philanthropy program.⁠[4]

On May 29, 2026, Upstarts Media released the episode that opened Season 2 of The Upstarts Podcast, hosted by Alex Konrad, with her as guest. The episode notes describe Orchid as the first startup to read the entire genome of an embryo, working with more than 100 clinics in the United States and abroad, charging $2,500 per screened embryo and having assisted with a number of successful births. The conversation covered her path as a Thiel Fellow and her leaving Stanford, why she compares earlier embryo testing to proofreading only a book’s chapter titles, the backlash over “superbabies” and the price, Silicon Valley’s tolerance for risk-taking, handling critics, and the cost and accessibility of IVF, including whether governments should cover it. She said that with screening “you can stack the odds in your child’s favor and have a superbaby.”⁠[6]

As of November 2026, Orchid’s podcast page calls her CEO of Orchid, and Orchid’s careers page also names her as CEO. Orchid’s website states that the company is CAP and CLIA certified and offers whole-genome embryo testing (PGT-WGS), testing for monogenic conditions (PGT-M) and for structural rearrangements (PGT-SR), and a Couple Report for prospective parents; its careers page gives the company’s mission as to “extend the healthspan of the next generation.”⁠[19][20][21]

Helena de Bertodano’s interview states that her parents are immigrants from Pakistan and both engineers, and that she grew up in Virginia in a family whose dinner-table discussions were highly intellectual; she has an older sister, and she recalled: “My [older] sister and my dad would spar about any topic.” The episode page of Progress Studies for Aspiring Young Scholars says she grew up in the suburbs of Virginia, an hour south of Washington, D.C. Upstarts Media’s episode notes use the phrase “Coming of age in San Francisco” for her years after moving to the Bay Area.⁠[4][10][6]

In 2024 she and her husband lived in San Francisco.⁠[4]

Her personal website states that after being a Thiel Fellow she went to Stanford University and earned a BS and an MS in computer science; at Stanford she did AI and genomics research and ran a translational group for entrepreneurial researchers in the Stanford AI Lab. The episode page of Progress Studies for Aspiring Young Scholars says she did deep-learning research in genomics with Anshul Kundaje and computer-vision research with Sebastian ThrunSebastian ThrunSebastian Thrun is a German-born computer scientist and entrepreneur who led the Stanford team that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, led Google’s self-driving car project and Google X, and founded the online education company Udacity.Open the full entry, and co-founded the Stanford Center for Distributed Trust. The Computer History Museum’s profile describes her as a Stanford student of computer science and genetics who wanted to apply computing to understanding DNA and improving human health.⁠[13][10][7]

She is one of the organizers of SAIL Entrepreneurs, a program of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, together with Adithya Ganesh, Chris Probert, Volodymyr Kuleshov and Guido Pusiol; the program fosters discussion between artificial intelligence researchers and venture capitalists interested in real-world AI products, meets three to four times a quarter in the Gates building, and opens applications for a new cohort every January to people actively working on a research project in the Stanford AI Lab.⁠[22]

Mercury’s 2024 profile lists backers including Elad Gil, Brian Armstrong, Vitalik ButerinVitalik ButerinVitalik Buterin is the originator of Ethereum, the author of its whitepaper, and one of its eight co-founders, as well as a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine. The Ethereum Foundation calls him the inventor of Ethereum; he has long been involved in protocol research and public discussion, but does not control the network as a CEO.Open the full entry, Mario Schlosser and Kevin and Julia Hartz, and says that the last two named were also among Orchid’s first customers. Orchid’s careers page lists investors including Refactor Capital, Day One Ventures and Village Global, as well as George ChurchGeorge ChurchGeorge Church (George M. Church) is an American geneticist, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and lead of synthetic biology at the Wyss Institute; he developed early direct genome sequencing methods and helped initiate the Human Genome Project and the Personal Genome Project.Open the full entry, Elad Gil, Vitalik Buterin, Anne Wojcicki, Carlos Bustamante and Brian Armstrong, and says the company is backed by founders of Coinbase, Counsyl, 23andMe, Flatiron, Eventbrite, Oscar and Clover. Helena de Bertodano’s interview mentions that her friend Masha Bucher is also an investor in Orchid.⁠[5][21][4]

In Scientific American, the genetic counselor Laura Hercher writes that Orchid’s first product on the market was its $1,100 “Couple Report,” which estimates prospective parents’ risk of conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and schizophrenia and the chance of passing it on, with a second phase to score IVF embryos. The article quotes her using the term “embryo prioritization” on the Mendelspod podcast and saying that “Parents are asking for this information and deserve to know it,” that objectors are “frankly being a little bit paternalistic,” and that “you have to respect patient autonomy”; it states that she did not respond to repeated requests for an interview from Scientific American.⁠[16]

The same article quotes doubts about using polygenic risk scores to select embryos: Peter Kraft, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said “We just don't know enough yet”; Alicia Martin of Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute noted that such scores transfer poorly to understudied populations and said “I think it is premature to try to roll this out”; and Gabriel Lázaro-Muñoz of Baylor College of Medicine worried that such companies could “bias the conversation,” adding “I think we have to be very aware of our history.” The article also cites a special report in the New England Journal of Medicine that called on the Federal Trade Commission to scrutinize claims by companies using polygenic scores to pick embryos. On the other side, the University of PennsylvaniaUniversity of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania, commonly called Penn, is a private research university and Ivy League member in Philadelphia. It traces its origins to a 1740 charity-school project; Benjamin Franklin proposed his academy in 1749, classes began in 1751, and a 1791 merger established the institution under its present name. Penn has 12 schools, with undergraduate education concentrated in arts and sciences, engineering, nursing and Wharton. Enrollment totaled 29,384 in fall 2025, and the fiscal 2025 endowment was $24.81 billion. As of October 2026, J. Larry Jameson was president, with his term scheduled to end on June 30, 2027.Open the full entry bioethicist Jonathan Anomaly, in an interview featured on Orchid’s website, regarded the population bias as solvable with more data.⁠[16]

George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and an investor in and adviser to Orchid, said in CNBCCNBCCNBC is an American business and financial news cable channel launched by NBC in 1989; it merged with its rival FNN in 1991 and since January 2026 has been part of Versant Media Group, spun off from Comcast.Open the full entry’s December 2023 coverage that it is “perfectly logical” for parents to care about their children’s health, while comparing the choice to gambling: “it's different when you're talking about quarters as opposed to children.” In Freethink’s article he called it “the future of preventive medicine and family planning.” Freethink’s article also notes that some researchers question whether polygenic risk scores are accurate enough for embryo selection, that critics worry embryo genome screening is a step toward “designer babies,” and it recalls Peter Kraft’s 2021 concern about how upfront Orchid is when counseling parents; the article quotes her as saying: “The way that you can use that information is really up to you.”⁠[17][18]

In the article Helena de Bertodano writes that anyone she talks to about Orchid almost physically recoils; during the interview she objected to one of Noor Siddiqui’s comparisons, saying it was different from “selecting embryos when there is no apparent medical need to do so”; the article also mentions concerns that the wealthy will breed “superbabies.” An IVF doctor, Michael Feinman, called Orchid a valuable tool in preventing severe diseases while acknowledging “ethical considerations and societal implications.” She herself called a story headlined “This woman will decide which babies are born” “sensational and silly.” Speaking of the backlash on The Upstarts Podcast in 2026, she said: “You can’t make things palatable for everyone.”⁠[4][6]

Orchid sets out its position on its “Principles & Ethics” page: everyone wants better health for their families, genetics affects health, prospective parents should have access to the best available scientific information and to choice, and families should have the option of reducing their future children’s disease risk through embryo screening.⁠[23]

An opinion of the Ethics Committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, published in Fertility and Sterility (2026, volume 125), concludes that preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders (PGT-P) should not be offered as a clinical service at this time, and that further research is needed to validate its utility and address its ethical concerns, research that should only be undertaken under an institutional review board protocol; the opinion names no company.⁠[24]

Her talks and appearances include TEDxBaltimore in Baltimore on January 25, 2012; the Singularity Summit in San Francisco on October 13, 2012; the Equinox Summit: Learning 2030 at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, from September 29 to October 3, 2013, and the TV program The Agenda With Steve Paikin at the same venue; and SXSW V2V in Las Vegas on August 12, 2013.⁠[11]

In 2014 she spoke at a wearable computing event of Bay Area Software Engineers in San Francisco, DEMO Enterprise, GLAZED, Kaiser Permanente’s Executive Leadership Summit, the International Society for Wearable Technology in Healthcare, a Wharton SiriusXM radio interview, a Singularity UniversitySingularity UniversitySingularity University is a technology and leadership education organization founded by Peter H. Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil. It offers short executive programs, organizational training and support for entrepreneurs, focusing on rapidly developing technologies and their social and business implications.Open the full entry wearables panel, the Rock Health Innovation Summit, Pakathon at Stanford, the MEF Global Forum and the IFC/SVB Emerging Technologies for Emerging Markets Forum. Her 2015 appearances included the Digital Health CEO Summit in San Francisco, the Milken Global Conference in Los Angeles, Wearable World Congress, 3DS, Menorca Millennials in Spain, a Tomodachi panel in BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry and the “Future of Medicine” event at Singularity University.⁠[11]

Later appearances include a screening and panel for the film Go Against The Flow in San Francisco in October 2016; “The Heart of the Matter: AI & Healthcare” in Palo Alto in February 2017; a panel on healthcare, AI and blockchain at Genesis Block in Hong Kong and the SVAI Download on AI applications in healthcare at the Computer History Museum, both in April 2018; a panel on entrepreneurship in healthcare for University of Minnesota medical-specialization MBA students at OptumLabs in San Francisco in January 2019; a conversation about Silicon Valley with Steve Hsu and Corey Washington on the Manifold podcast in February 2019; a keynote, “Genomics, AI, and the future of IVF,” at Summit:IVF in Aspen, ColoradoColoradoColorado is a U.S. state classified as one of the Mountain states, with Denver as its capital. It was admitted to the Union on August 1, 1876, as the 38th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 5,773,714.Open the full entry, on February 10, 2020; and the podcast The Torch of Progress of Progress Studies for Aspiring Young Scholars on July 3, 2020.⁠[11][10]

Her personal website contains 12 posts written in 2016–2019: “Female Imams” (May 12, 2016), “Perspectives on a centralized vs. decentralized web” (March 6, 2017), “What to consider when starting a new project” (June 17, 2017), “What is in your genome?” (October 2, 2017), “Pharmacogenomics” (November 9, 2017), “How Gene Therapy Works” (November 17, 2017), “How to get to know someone” (January 6, 2018), “Availability Cascades” (June 21, 2018), “What is ChIP-seq? ATAC-seq?” (August 1, 2018), “The Greatest Hits in Side Channel Attacks” (October 28, 2018), “The Neuroscience of Free Will” (June 28, 2019) and “Entropy for Kids” (July 12, 2019). Her About page also recommends four favorite essays of under 40 pages: C. S. Lewis’s “The Inner Ring,” Paul Graham’s “What You Can't Say,” Peter Thiel’s class notes on “Secrets,” and Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life.”⁠[25][13]

In “Female Imams” she reviews the Quran, hadith and scholarly opinion and argues that restrictions on women leading Friday prayers, giving the khutbah or praying at the front of the hall rest mainly on cultural rather than religious grounds, and that there is no scholarly consensus on the question.⁠[26]

“What to consider when starting a new project” presents the final project she made for a film class, a video that zooms out to the scale of the Earth and in to the cellular level, to convey the mindset she shifts into when starting a new project she is intimidated to begin; “What is in your genome?” explains the basic make-up of the genome and credits Gill Bejerano, associate professor of developmental biology, computer science, biomedical data science and genetics, for its content; “How to get to know someone” collects the questions she likes to ask people she has just met.⁠[27][28][29]

Personal website: https://noorsiddiqui.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[25]

X: Public account: https://x.com/noor_siddiqui_ (opens in a new window).⁠[25]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noorsiddiqui/ (opens in a new window).⁠[15]

Conceivable with Noor: Official website: https://conceivable.orchidhealth.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[19]

Spotify: Public show: https://open.spotify.com/show/5pMJ6bhjxhDczXPZre1w1q (opens in a new window).⁠[19]

Apple Podcasts: Public show: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/conceivable-with-noor/id1721905069 (opens in a new window).⁠[19]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[30]

#nofilter: Official website: https://nofiltertalks.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[12]

Orchid: Official website: https://www.orchidhealth.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[20]

CS 17si Frontiers in Reproductive Technology: Web page: https://reproductivetech.stanford.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[14]

SAIL Entrepreneurs: Web page: https://ai.stanford.edu/entrepreneurs/index.html (opens in a new window).⁠[22]