34 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COMGEORGE CHURCH WANTS US TO CHOOSE
OUR LOVERS USING GENETICS.A
singular obsession defines George
Church’s life. He wants to crack open the
cellular machinery of every human on
Earth and read their genetic blueprint.
Tall and thin with an enormous white puffy
beard and hair to match, Church looks like he’d
be as comfortable at Hogwarts as he’s been at
Harvard Medical School, where he is a professor of
genetics, over the past three decades. His projects
can seem just as wizardly. Church has explored
everything from reversing aging to resurrecting
the woolly mammoth, and he helped launch the
revolutionary Human Genome Project (HGP),
which sequenced human DNA in its entirety.
But it’s another goal — one Church has never
stopped working on — that could carry the great-
est potential to alter life on our planet. Ever since
his work on HGP, he’s been trying to sequence the
rest of us. And he wants to use that information
to shape how we pick our mates.FROM PARENT TO CHILD
The blueprint of any life-form can be found in that
organism’s DNA. These strands are condensed into
packages called chromosomes; humans have 23
pairs. At the moment of conception, an embryo
gets one copy of each — including tens of thou-
sands of genes — from each parent.In general, genes for a particular trait are
either dominant or recessive. Dominant genes
overpower recessive ones. So, a child dealt both
a dominant and a recessive gene ends up with the
trait encoded by the dominant gene.
Most of us carry recessive genes for various
diseases inside our DNA. We can go through life
unharmed because we also have a healthy, domi-
nant copy of the gene. But when two parents who
each carry a defective copy of a gene have a child,
there’s a risk that their offspring could end up
with two defective copies of the gene. Worldwide,
roughly 5 percent of children are born with seri-
ous birth defects caused by a single gene.
However, if each of us had our genome
sequenced — and used it to choose lovers — we
could change that. Church estimates such an
effort would effectively end some 7,000 genetic
diseases, from sickle cell anemia to cystic fibrosis.
Stretched to its fullest potential, he says, it could
save 50 million lives a year. That’s Church’s goal.
He likens genome sequencing to the internet
back in the early 1990s. Sure, it existed, but people
didn’t know what to do with it. Its world-changing
potential sat for years, waiting to be unlocked.
Several things have held back Church’s dream.
Until recently, the price of full genome sequenc-
ing was too high, and not enough people wereLOVE,
GENETICALLY
BY ERIC BETZ