by Lone Frank
“We could see that the principle of a preference for differences in HLA genes held up and, at the same time, there were some characteristic patterns in the combinations. It seemed to matter what differences there were between the two. Certain combinations of HLA variants were far more frequent among our couples than people would have expected from the distribution in the population.”
When I make reference to the conflicting reports in the literature about the extent to which the HLA preference exists in real life, Brown cocks her head and says “hmm.” And when I ask where GenePartner’s study is published, I learn that it isn’t.
“Not because we couldn’t if we wanted to,” emphasizes Brown, “but if we tell the whole world what we’ve done and what we found, we’d have no protection for our business.”
The business is an algorithm. From their observations in the volunteers, according to Brown, they were able to calculate how a given combination of HLA variants would fit together – that is, how attracted the partners were to each other and what the chances were that it would hold together over the long run.
“As a trained biologist and ex-researcher, I am quite interested in what makes some combinations better than others. But we can’t really go into that right now.”
At this point, they have provided tests to well over a thousand couples, most of whom live in the United States; in Europe it is the Swiss who especially seek their services. Of course, some of their clients are people who have just met, but GenePartner also analyzes the genes in established relationships, usually because the parties have heard about the effect, found in Wedekind’s original experiment, of the birth control pill on attraction. When they met, the woman was taking the pill, but now she has given them up and the relationship is no longer working so well.
“We don’t get to know what happens with them after the test, but it says something about how much faith people have in these genetic factors,” says Brown, emphasizing that she’s out to substantiate this belief with data. “In fact, we’re trying to enter a collaboration with private matchmakers, because they bring people together and get personal feedback after their meetings. With that sort of data, we would be able to document whether it gave a greater success rate to use the HLA test.” The first collaboration is in place and will be called DNASoulmate.
While Brown waits for her documentation, business must go on. The company is already developing a new product – an HLA algorithm for homosexual couples. The American dating portal Clickk is offering the service to its gay and lesbian users, and GenePartner is testing away to see whether homosexuals can also use genes to navigate the meat market.
“Our goal is for the HLA test to become a standard in a few years. That people will combine both social and biological compatibility. I believe that genetics must be seen as the last tool to narrow down a field that is already screened for the social aspects we know are important. You know the level of education, interests, goals in life, and all that.”
But why stop with HLA genes? There may be other predispositions that could conceivably let us get deep under the skin of our potential partners. I immediately think of the commotion aroused when a Swedish team announced it had identified what the media promptly dubbed an “infidelity gene.” The result was packaged in a thin, concise article, published in the well-regarded journal PNAS, and it pointed to a genetic variance in men’s connection with their partner. Paul Lichtenstein of the Karolinska Institutet hadn’t pulled this idea out of thin air. He had investigated the gene for the vasopressin receptor, which is found in the brains of mammals and which, among other things, is cited as a key reason a gerbil lives either monogamously or promiscuously.
The gene, called in everyday language APVR1A, exists in three variants in human beings. Lichtenstein and his colleagues gene-tested 552 pairs of twins and their partners and also gave them questionnaires to characterize their relationship. For example, they were asked to judge the strength of their mutual attachment, which was coded to a scale. And wouldn’t you know, gene variant 334, which makes gerbils promiscuous, also proved to have a certain connection to a man’s poorer relationship with his partner. Women whose husbands had two copies of 334 were, on average, somewhat less satisfied with their relationship than were other women. And whereas only fifteen percent of men without the variant reported a crisis in their marriage, thirty-four percent of men with two 334 copies did. The latter group also married half as frequently as the study’s other men. Of course, write the authors, the results cannot be used to predict the behavior of individuals, but this remark got lost in the media coverage.
On the other side of the table, Brown is intrigued. I neglect to mention I have found a little laboratory in Arizona, Genesis Biolabs, which conducts the test.
I would like to bring more than just sex and infidelity into this conversation. Recently, Neil Risch and Esteban González Burchard of the University of California San Francisco, discovered evidence that two Latin population groups choose partners that have, more or less, the same racial mixture as themselves. The researchers gene-tested Mexican couples in San Francisco and Mexico as well as Puerto Rican couples in New York and Puerto Rico. The couples were compared for hundreds of markers spread throughout the genome. From these, they found that the Mexican spouses resembled each other with respect to their Indian and European roots. The same held true for Puerto Rican spouses – though only with respect to their African and European roots. Now, you might think this just had something to do with coming from the same class or social background, but when the researchers looked into socio-economic conditions, these couldn’t explain the results. “People seem to gauge their partners, perhaps on an unconscious level,” Burchard said to New Scientist.
Brown says that she “certainly sees the possibilities” for testing a wide range of markers. “I think that, at some point, we will expand our service and array of products, but we don’t yet know what it will be. But if you ask me how dating sites will look in ten years, there will certainly be a number of genetic services. I can easily imagine that the health-risk profiles from 23andMe and others will be one of the parameters you can assess each other with. And there will certainly be a desire to see the other person’s status with respect to one or more genes we know from behavioral genetics.”
I wonder whether I would be rejected for my worrying COMT variants. Or my sensitive SERT, for that matter. And what would I find unpromising in a man? Brown claps her hands and pulls me out of my romantic gene reverie, suggesting we move to the computer. “Let’s look at your data.”
To start, she enters my code and then my boyfriend’s into the system. On the screen, a minute scale appears and an arrow points at seventy percent. It is a bit of a mystery to me how you are supposed to interpret the number, but I scan the accompanying, helpful text:
This genetic pattern reveals a high level of biological compatibility. Most couples show a corresponding result. This provides a good basis for a very strong and stable long-term relationship. Couples with this genetic pattern often report a high level of physical attraction and passion. However, please be aware that both social and biological compatibility are important for a lasting and satisfying relationship.
“It’s a fine match,” concludes Brown. “Most couples in our research project were between sixty percent and eighty percent. You could say you feel seventy percent attracted by him and, in addition, there is a scale for the type of interest that goes with the HLA results. If all your genes are different, you would be romantically very attracted, but if there were more common genes, you could still make an excellent match. In that case, our results indicate that you feel safe with each other, if you know what I mean. And since we saw fewer couples who were maximally different with respect to HLA, I think it may be due to the fact that the attraction is so strong starting out that you ignore social differences and conflicting interests that then later make the relationship fall apart.”
It sounds like I should keep the one I’ve got.
“Yes, he’s okay,” she answers a little absently. She is already looking at my colleague J, who, I have told her, is a bit of a playboy.
“Whoah, he’s almost a perfect match,” she says, fingering the screen, where the arrow is hitting eighty percent.
This genetic combination is typical for a very satisfying relationship, which also offers a high level of physical attraction. This means that both parties presumably find each other very attractive. This is important, because it means that the chances for intimacy will not diminish over time. You will presumably retain a passionate and highly fulfilling relationship. However, please be aware that both social and biological compatibility are important for a lasting and satisfying relationship.
“Everything looks good here. Aren’t you attracted by him?”
Maybe, I am – somewhat – on some level, but the idea is just to have a child together and share custody.
“Yes, well, it would be a good child. Or – at least, there would be a good chance for a successful pregnancy. You have something to think about.”
“HOW DID THE tests go?” asks J, when he calls me later in the day from Copenhagen. He’s sitting in a café with “a beautiful girl” as he puts it, but still has the energy to think of his possible progeny.
“Did you get the word?”
There’s no way around it, and I have to tell him that he looks to be the best of my alternatives.
“I knew it!”
Later in the day, he texts me with an entirely new argument for a quick coupling:
Do you realize what this child would do for your book? We could consider it our contribution to literary history.
CHILDREN. OFFSPRING. YOUNG ’UNS. You can’t get around the fact that this is the entire point of this genetic information – its own continuation in new combinations. You can’t talk about genetics without getting into children, and you can’t talk about today’s explosion of knowledge and technological ability without speculating what it means for the children of the future. And, thus, the future of humanity.
So, since I’m trapped in a hotel room in the middle of Zürich, the immaculate city, I do a little research. On my stroll through cyberspace, I happen upon a comment that sums up the day’s activities very well. Randall Parker, the man behind the FuturePundit blog, writes,” Looking down the line ten to twenty years I expect to see online dating services match people up based on avoidance of shared harmful recessive genes. Searchers for Mr and Mrs Right will get steered toward prospective mates with whom they can pretty safely make babies.”
That is not at all improbable. And it reminds me of a conversation I had a long time ago now with an old acquaintance who also happened to be a geneticist. Armand Leroi experiments with mice in his lab at Imperial College in London, but he is happy to talk about human genetics. In his book Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body, he muses about the strange things that can happen when our genes do not behave. Later, in a controversial opinion piece in the New York Times, he advocated that characteristic genetic differences make it reasonable to talk about races among human beings. The last time we met, he was talking about calculating the individual’s genetic quotient.
The conversation took place at a very hip and very noisy restaurant in London’s pricey Knightsbridge. Over a bloody steak, Leroi interpreted his ideas about putting numbers on a person’s overall genetic health or quality. Somewhat in the style of an intelligence quotient, which provides a general measure of a person’s intellectual capacity.
To hear how far he has come I phone, and catch him at home, just returned from a diving vacation in the Red Sea. The conversation takes place over the Internet service Skype and, as we peer into our little web cams, I can see that he hasn’t changed much. Slim, appropriately sunburned, and balding in a decorative way. His office, of which I catch glimpses, reflects good taste. There is a Persian or Afghan rug on the floor and small, exotic wooden sculptures scattered on the available surfaces. The cramped bookcase behind him reaches from floor to ceiling, yet still gives an impression of order and planning.
“Oh, yes, the genetic quotient,” replies Leroi, who is apparently just pulling himself together. He lights a cigarette and fills my screen image with smoke.
“And this is something you want to quote me on?”
That was the idea.
“Yes, well, it’s been a while since I worked on that project, but it will get going again. At some point.”
The inspiration at the time, a few years earlier, came to him, he explains, from a television series about weird mutants – people with a thick fur covering their body, or with minuscule heads, or with a predilection to move on all fours. “I thought at the time that mutations were rare, but it struck me that, as soon as you discuss the topic with people, it turns out that they all have one or more family members with genetic diseases. All families carry a lot of mutations and, even though individual diseases are themselves rare, they collectively represent a massive burden on society. Far greater than you’d think.”
He sticks his nose into an enormous coffee mug and types with his left hand: “Have you read my 2006 commentary?”
I confess that it has escaped my attention, and I immediately receive a copy through the ether. It is impossible to restrain a certain astonishment when I see the title: “The Future of Neo-eugenics.”
“Let’s call a spade a spade,” Leroi says coolly. “Modern society has been practicing eugenics a long time. It’s already a widespread practice and, believe me, it will become even more widespread.”
The spade my friend – quite correctly – calls eugenics is what we normally call “abortion for medical reasons;” – the removal of embryos with genetic or physical abnormalities discovered by genetic tests or ultrasound scans. In 2002, women in the G8 countries decided to abort a fifth of these embryos, which corresponds to approximately forty thousand abortions every year. As a result, the number of inherited illnesses has become rarer, and certain genetic diseases due to mutations in a single gene are, in particular, disappearing. In the United States, very few children with the serious Tay-Sachs neurological syndrome are born, and in Canada, Australia, and Europe, the number of new cases of cystic fibrosis has dropped significantly.
“In other words, eugenics has already had a positive effect on the rate of sickness and child mortality. My opinion piece is an attempt to raise the question: when will it be time to screen all fetuses for all known mutations?”
The question is based on simple calculations. Leroi has checked the frequency of thousands of mutations that we know lead to disease when an embryo inherits a copy from both parents and, with the number that was known in 2006, the risk of finding a monogenic disease in a random embryo was 0.4 per cent, or 1 in 256.
“I think that number is quite high,” says Leroi, “and I think it comes close to a frequency that would make widespread screening programs interesting. A risk of 1 in 256 is in the vicinity of the risk that justified screening programs for cervical cancer and breast cancer. And with the many more mutations that are known today, the number would be even higher, if I repeated the same calculation.”
What could count against the screening for tens of thousands of mutations is the cost, Leroi admits, but as he himself recalls, “It’s falling drastically all the time.”
I permit myself to point out the sheer physical and personal costs. If you want to sequence a fetus’s complete genome or, at least, gene-test it using a gene chip, you have to undertake an amniocentesis, which carries a risk of miscarriage. But Leroi is thinking along other, more advanced lines. He imagines that in the future we will screen and select fertilized eggs before they even come into contact with a uterus. This process, pre-implantation diagnostics, involves taking a single cell from each of the fertilized eggs a couple has produced in vitro, and investigating its genome.
“Is it unrealistic to think that, at some point, all children in the industrialized world will be conceived in a test tube?” asks Leroi, focusing his e
yes on the web cam. I shrug my shoulders.
“Globally, the use of pre-implantation diagnostics is increasing dramatically,” he answers himself. Whereupon he squints and takes a long drag on his cigarette.
“We’re not talking about perfection here. You may get eight fertilized eggs, and they will all harbor lots of mutations, but it’s about limiting their number and rejecting the worst. As I say, ‘we’re all mutants, but some are more mutant than others.’”
From this perspective, you could also follow the path suggested by Randall Parker and gene-test future parents. Then, if both carry mutations that might lead to disease if the embryo gets a double dose, you need only resort to glassware and pre-implantation diagnostics to weed out any unlucky fertilized eggs.
This model is precisely what the American firm Counsyl advocates. The company, which was conceived by a couple of students from Stanford University, was launched with great fanfare in 2010, touting what they themselves call a “universal genetic test.” With a gene chip, they test mutations that are involved in a little over a hundred genetic diseases, at a cost of $350 a person or $685 for couples. If this rings a bell, it could be because of the Dor Yeshorim –” upright generation” – project. Founded in the 1980s, in Brooklyn, this worldwide program offers genetic testing for ten recessive diseases that are prevalent among the Orthodox Jewish community of Ashkenazi descent. The project’s founders advocate anonymous testing of school-age children; the families never learn the results but receive a PIN. When those families who practise arranged marriages seek a match, they can enter the PIN for the prospective bride and groom into a database, and Dor Yeshorim will tell them whether the two share unfortunate mutations. If that is the case, no dates need be arranged and no one needs to know exactly why.
For Counsyl, the goal is to make genetic testing as mundane as the home pregnancy test, says the company’s director Ramji Srinivasan. His brother, Balaji, has said that they see themselves as “social entrepreneurs with a mission.” The siblings have allied themselves with a high-profile group of advisers, including the psychologist Steven Pinker, who offers an endorsement on the company’s website: “Universal genetic testing can drastically reduce the incidence of genetic diseases, and may very well eliminate many of them.” Nearby, another Harvard luminary and Counsyl “community advisor,” Professor Henry Louis Gates, assures us that he considers the test”… a genuine breakthrough for minority health.”