A Genetic Dating App Is a Horrifying Thing That Shouldnt Exist – Free

For marginalized people, the tech worlds constant barrage of innovations is getting exhausting. It seems like every week, science and tech pioneers are revealing new projects that pose a clear threat to anyone not white, cisgender, or malewhether its porn deepfakes or algorithms that judge womens boobs.

Enter Harvard Medical School, where researchers are creating a new dating app that matches people based on their DNA. The goal is to create a system that screens out matches that would result in a child with an inherited disease, according to a report aired Sunday night on 60 Minutes.

In other words, its a dating app for eugenicsthe disturbing ideological practice of systematically discriminating against people based on genetic qualities judged to be undesirable or inferior.

The app is being developed by a team of geneticists led by George Church, who, in the same interview, defended accepting money for his lab donated by convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Churchs lab is most famous for its work on the gene-editing technology CRISPR/Cas9, and its researchers are looking at ways to make humans immune to viruses, reverse the effects of aging, and de-extinct animals. Its 7,000 diseases, its about 5 percent of the population, [and] about $1 trillion a year worldwide in medical expenses, Church told 60 Minutes.

But for anyone not white, cis, able-bodied, or male, its obvious where all this is going.

Eugenics has long been a fascination of Nazis and white supremacists, who dream of creating a white and genetically pure master race. Dystopian sci-fi tales like Gattaca have also warned of the horrifying dangers of organizing society based on the perceived desirability (or undesirability) of peoples genetic code.

For people who exist outside mainstream gender norms, these dangers are very real. Last week, Newsweek reported on a team of researchers at the University of Michigan who are attempting to identify regions of the brain associated with gender dysphoriathe discomfort which occurs when a persons gender does not match the sex they were assigned at birth.

Many, but not all transgender people experience gender dysphoria, and it has been used to establish a system of medical gatekeeping that pathologizes trans people and controls access to treatments like hormone replacement therapy and gender-affirming surgeries. But even if scientists identified some hypothetical trait that causes people to be trans, choosing to edit out those traits would be an attempt to effectively erase trans people from existence.

Meanwhile, research into trans medical treatments remains severely underfunded. The federal government is also trying to make it legal for medical providers to refuse to treat trans patientswhether for gender dysphoria or a broken arm.

In other words, these cis researchers, funders, and policymakers seem more interested in curing or erasing trans people than finding better and cheaper ways of treating themor anyone else labeled as falling outside the norm of biologic desirability. Churchs lab, for example, recently received over $100 million for its work on gene-editing.

Church says he is being careful, and claims his lab has appointed a full-time ethicist on its staff to work toward the goal of genetic equitywhere all people have access to genetic technology, regardless of race or economic status.

But for marginalized people suffering under deeply unequal and discriminatory systems of power, that mission seems dangerously naive. If the people who risk being most harmed by these innovations arent intimately involved in their development, maybe its better toyou knownot make them at all?

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A Genetic Dating App Is a Horrifying Thing That Shouldnt Exist - Free