In his petition, Vitti noted that Bellenson lives in Uganda, where gay sex is punishable by life in prison. Some echoed Vitti’s concern that the app could be abused. He says that the app has always warned users that it is not predictive, and as such does not misrepresent the study.īut the chorus of angry scientists on Twitter grew louder. The next week, Bellenson renamed the app ‘122 Shades of Gray’ and added a note explaining that the authors of the Science study weren’t affiliated with the project. Neale sent a letter to GenePlaza on 14 October asking that it take down the app - or remove references to his study. But none of the variants was so prevalent that the researchers could use them to predict a person’s sexual identity. He and his colleagues examined the DNA of around 475,000 people and found several genetic variations loosely correlated with people who said they'd had sex with someone of the same sex at least once. It won’t tell you anything”, says Benjamin Neale, a geneticist at the Broad Institute and an author of the Science analysis. The researchers behind the Science study say that Bellenson’s app misrepresents their work. The app cited the Science paper while warning users that it did not predict same-sex attraction. For US$5.50, a person could upload their genetic data - as supplied by consumer DNA sequencing companies such as 23andMe of Mountain View, California - and the app would place them along a gradient of same-sex attraction. “This is just going to get harder and harder as we go along.” Brewing controversyīellenson posted his app on GenePlaza, an online marketplace for DNA-interpretation tools, in early October. “It’s the Wild West of genetics,” says Erin Demo, a genetic counsellor at Sibley Heart Center Cardiology in Atlanta, Georgia.
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Scientists and genetic counsellors say that these unregulated tools can harm individuals and society, by causing anxiety, unnecessary medical expenses, stigmatization and worse. Anyone can take the variations identified by such studies, strip them of caveats and nuance, and market a simple genetic interpretation tool online. Researchers conduct statistically sophisticated analyses of hundreds of thousands of genomes, searching for associations between genetic variations and diseases, behaviours or other characteristics. But the furore over the app highlights a growing problem in the field of genetics.
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Within two weeks, more than 1,660 people had signed it.īellenson says the idea that his test could endanger people is an “absurd scenario” and notes that the test included a disclaimer that it could not predict same-sex attraction.
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“There are vulnerable queer people all over the world,” says Vitti, “and this app stands to hurt them.” On 11 October, he started an online petition to remove the test. Vitti, a computational geneticist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, thinks the app was misleading - even dangerous. The app’s creator, Joel Bellenson, a US entrepreneur living in Kampala, Uganda, based the test on the findings of a massive study on the genetics of same-sex sexual behaviour - even though the analysis, published in Science in August, concluded that a person’s genes cannot predict their sexuality 1. It took him to an app called ‘How Gay Are You?’ that purported to gauge a person’s level of attraction to others of the same sex, according to their genes.
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Joseph Vitti’s stomach turned when he opened a link an acquaintance had sent him. Millions of people have had their DNA analysed by consumer genetic-testing companies.