Dec 12 · 7 min read
Harvard geneticist George Church — known for his ambitious and often provocative biotech research projects, like attempting to resurrect the woolly mammoth, reverse aging, and make human cells resistant to all viruses — is working on yet another venture that is raising eyebrows: a DNA-based dating app.
In an interview with 60 Minutes this week, Church said the app will compare users’ DNA with the genetic code of potential partners and screen out matches that would result in a child with an inherited disease. “You wouldn’t find out who you’re not compatible with. You’ll just find out who you are compatible with,” he said in the interview with Scott Pelley. It’s not the first time Church has talked about the idea of “genetic matchmaking.” Adding a layer of scrutiny to Church’s proposed app is the fact that he met with and accepted funding from convicted child sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Church’s app doesn’t exist yet, but critics say it sounds like a contemporary form of eugenics, the 19th-century idea of genetically “improving” the human species by using selective breeding for supposedly desirable traits. They’re right to be concerned about which genes the app would screen for and whether disabled people and those with genetic diseases could end up further marginalized. But an app that looks for debilitating disorders could actually be helpful for some would-be parents. And, in fact, similar services to the one Church is proposing already exist, albeit on a smaller scale.
Take Dor Yeshorim, a nonprofit organization founded in 1983 that provides genetic screening to members of the Jewish community. People of Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jewish descent are at a higher risk for certain inherited diseases, like Tay-Sachs, an often-fatal disorder in children that destroys nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. Both parents need to carry the genetic mutation for Tay-Sachs for their children to inherit the disease. Dor Yeshorim’s founder, Josef Ekstein, is a rabbi who lost four children to the devastating disorder.
The organization conducts mass screening drives at high schools and universities, taking blood samples from young people and analyzing their DNA for genes associated with Tay-Sachs and other serious genetic diseases. Each person screened receives a nine-digit code that corresponds to their genetic sample. The results are banked so that later on, couples can call a hotline, enter both parties’ ID numbers, and within a few hours know whether they are at risk of passing on one of those diseases to their future children. According to the organization’s website, Dor Yeshorim screens 25,000 young adults across 11 countries annually. Other services, like JScreen, provide genetic testing to Jewish people.
In Iceland, which has a population of about 330,000 that shares similar genetics, an online genealogical database called Íslendingabók seeks to prevent people from accidentally dating their cousin. In a country with a small population where surnames don’t reflect the family lineage, it’s not uncommon to meet a stranger who is not-so-distantly related.
And medicine already uses genetic testing to allow parents or those thinking about becoming parents to assess their risk of having a child with a serious disease. One method, carrier screening, looks at DNA from a blood sample or cheek swab to find out whether a person carries gene variations for certain disorders, like cystic fibrosis. Being a carrier means you have a genetic mutation associated with a recessive disease; you don’t have any signs or symptoms of it, but you are capable of passing it on. Two carriers of the same disease have a 25% chance of having a child with that disease. Routine carrier screening today includes about 120 different genes.
Then there’s the suite of prenatal screening tests offered to pregnant women, which look for genetic diseases, birth defects, and infections like HIV that could be passed from mother to baby. Which diseases people choose to get tested for depends on their ethnicity, medical history, and personal values — some parents may want to know whether their child is at risk for Down syndrome, for instance, while others won’t. No prenatal test is mandatory, so women and couples can choose for themselves which tests they want to undergo.
“It’s not the technology itself that’s problematic. It’s how we use it.”
For those undergoing in vitro fertilization, a method called preimplantation genetic testing has been available since the 1990s to screen out embryos with genetic mutations or an abnormal number of chromosomes and ensure that only healthy embryos are implanted in a would-be mother.
“The essence of the app is something we’ve been doing for decades,” says Vardit Ravitsky, a bioethicist at the Université de Montréal. “It’s not the technology itself that’s problematic. It’s how we use it.”
Many would not consider these technologies to be eugenics, which usually refers to coercive policies that are meant to control who can have children, but rather family planning tools that provide reproductive autonomy. That means it is the couple’s decision whether to act on any information provided by the tests by aborting a fetus harboring a genetic condition or birth defect.
The key difference between these options and Church’s app, of course, is that most of this testing happens when people start thinking seriously about having children or are already pregnant, not when they’re casually dating. Having children isn’t everyone’s primary purpose of dating — and as birth rates in the United States keep dropping, this is probably truer than ever. But Church’s app aims to prevent people who are not genetically “matched” from dating in the first place.
One of the major concerns about the app is whether it would prevent some people from having children in the first place by making it harder for them to date. “If mainstream dating apps begin to integrate some level of genetic information into their algorithms, I think it’s a realistic risk that some people find themselves disadvantaged,” Ravitsky says.
In a Q&A published on his website on Wednesday, Church clarified that the app will screen only for “very serious diseases” that affect about 5% of births. “So everyone is genetically compatible (in this sense) with roughly 95% of people that they would be considering for dating,” he says. But Ravitsky says the devil is in the details about how a “serious disease” is defined.
Users will be able to see only positive matches and won’t know why they didn’t match with someone, according to Church. MIT Technology Review reports that Church has co-founded a company called Digid8 with Harvard graduate Barghavi Govindarajan to develop the app. (Church did not respond to an interview request from OneZero.)
Church says in the Q&A that he does not want to socially stigmatize people with genetic diseases, and that this “need not interfere with individuals and families learning and taking action on their own behalf.”
But technology can have unintended consequences. Recently, a startup called Insolent AI created an app called How Gay Are You?, which claimed to estimate a person’s attraction to the same sex. The app was based on a scientific study published in August that found that many genetic factors seem to play a role in same-sex sexual behavior — far too many to develop a reliable genetic test for sexuality. But that didn’t stop an app developer from misusing the results. As researchers learn more about the genetic underpinnings of complex traits and publish those findings for anyone to access, it’s entirely possible that developers could inappropriately incorporate them into an app — even if that’s not Church’s intention.
Then there are the privacy and security issues. How can app users trust that a company will keep their data safe? Church proposes using encryption, blockchain, and other methods. But that assumes people will want to allow a dating app access to their genetic code in the first place.
That brings us to the question of who’s actually going to use an app like this. Perhaps it’s those who don’t believe in abortion, are in certain ethnic or religious groups, or already know they have a genetic disease or that one runs in their family. However, it’s unlikely that eligible singles are going to join a genetic dating site en masse in the near future. Sequencing a person’s genes is still an expensive endeavor, at about $700 to $800. (Veritas Genetics, a whole genome sequencing company founded by Church that boasted less expensive services, abruptly shut down its U.S. operations last week.) Most people probably won’t pay that much to get access to a dating service when plenty of free apps are available and having a child is not their immediate objective.
But the cost of genome sequencing keeps falling, and in the near future it’s conceivable that everyone will get their DNA sequenced. That could make some form of genetic dating a reality.
“If there’s a very wide uptake — and I’m very very skeptical as to this possibility — then it might change the structure; in other words, the composition of the population,” says Giulia Cavaliere, a bioethicist at Lancaster University in the U.K. If widely used, “what matters is that there would be continuing support for people living with these conditions and for everyone to make autonomous decisions in reproductive matters,” she says.
Even if DNA dating apps do become popular, they won’t completely eradicate genetic disease, which can still arise from spontaneous mutations when an embryo or fetus is developing. And for many people, love is still likely to reign over DNA.
“I would hope that society sees the benefit of diversity—not just ancestral diversity, but in our abilities,” Church said in the 60 Minutes interview. “There’s no perfect person.”
