No eugenics!

George Church: "It's ridiculous to compare a dating service with a Nazi sterilization program"

Sergey Kolenov, Hi-tech+

Last week, the famous Harvard geneticist George Church found himself in the center of a major scandal. During an appearance on the program "60 Minutes" on CBS, he said that he was developing a dating app based on DNA analysis.

The main task of the service is to select couples who are most likely to have healthy children. Potential partners with certain mutations that increase the likelihood of a number of diseases, the user simply will not see.

These statements generated a wave of criticism. The scientist was accused of trying to revive eugenics, a pseudoscientific discipline designed to improve human heredity through selection.

Church himself is sure that his intentions were distorted. In an interview with the Daily Beast, he noted that the application, which has not yet been developed, will offer users a choice, while eugenics implies coercion. According to the scientist, it is ridiculous to compare the dating service with Nazi sterilization programs.

Church also noted that the app will track the risk of a small number of diseases that have a clear genetic cause and are associated with premature death, suffering and large medical expenses. This means that only 5% of potential matches will be rejected.

The scientist posted additional information about the scandalous application on his website.

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