How gay are you?

Controversial issues of sociogenomics

Alexey Aleksenko, "Snob"

Many years ago, having barely entered the path of a scientific observer of the "Snob", the author wrote a note entitled "The secret of the binary genome", which caused a heated discussion at that time. 

The following scientific news was discussed: a group of researchers compared the genomes (that is, the sequence of letters-nucleotides in DNA) of 126 thousand individuals, comparing these data with their academic achievements – the number of years spent at school, college and university. Three positions in the genome were found, the differences in which correlated with academic success, and together they were responsible for 2% of the spread in this parameter.

Only 2%, but the public was outraged: this means that it is somehow written in the genes whether the child will become an excellent student or a two-year student! But what about the innate equality of all people?! Even two percent of innate discrimination is already innate discrimination: ethics requires that it be exactly 0. No rational arguments have convinced the most stubborn debaters that there is nothing to worry about yet. 

In 2013, perhaps it was really too early to worry. But in 2016, the same authors compared 300,000 genomes already, and it became possible to write off 3.2% of the spread for differences in genes – now 74 have been found. Two more years passed, the sample exceeded one million, and the genetic influence on education was 13%. This is about as much as, according to statistics, can be attributed to social and economic factors. For comparison: according to modern data, human growth is determined by genes by 20% (that is, this proportion of variability can be reliably attributed to differences in DNA letters in those positions where the influence is statistically significant).

And here it's time to be alarmed. Decoding the genome, it turns out, allows you to predict the fate of a person. In fact, this was known before: the genome determines whether a child will become dark-skinned or light-skinned, a boy or a girl, and there are no problems with this. Problems begin when genes can be attributed to those qualities for which it is customary to praise or scold. For deuces – as Fedor Reshetnikov's painting "Deuce Again" suggests to us – it is customary to scold, and it is customary to be proud of fives. If everything is written in the genes, it means that everything is allowed. That's what an annoying collision we've come to, and now we'll have to figure it out.

Fyodor Reshetnikov. "Deuce Again", 1952. The State Tretyakov Gallery, MoskvaFoto: Wikimedia Commons.

Why is it dangerous to decode many genomes

Now it seems strange that the first draft of the human genome was published less than two decades ago. Since then, the number of decoded genomes of different people has been counted by millions, not to mention the genomes of Neanderthals, Denisovans and all kinds of human fossils.

Knowing the exact sequence of letters in human DNA allows you to answer many questions that scientists would really like to know the answer to (including those that they have not even posed yet). But it turns out that comparing the genomes of many people holds the key to such questions, the answers to which we may not really want to know. We are talking about the "Genome-Wide Association Studies" (GWAS). Questions, for example, of this kind: "Is this individual not inclined from birth to violent crimes? Maybe it makes sense to send him to the colony in advance, before he kills anyone?"

The study looks like this: a computer compares the DNA sequences of a large number of people, comparing them with a certain social quality – for example, whether the carrier of this genome is in prison for murder. The computer says that those who sit in it, in such and such a position, the letter A is relatively more common, and the letter G is less common than law-abiding citizens.

"A coincidence? I don't think so!" – dear Dmitry Kiselyov would say in this case (by the way, congratulations on his election as head of the council The Union of Winegrowers and Winemakers of Russia is a very worthy and important work for the benefit of the country). However, statistics in such a situation do not need to "think" anything. Whether it is a coincidence or not, she will find out by the exact formula and will give an answer: the probability of a random coincidence is not higher, for example, 1%. Modern genomic studies, of course, are far from such accuracy, but they can establish the presence of a reliable association of the genotype with the social quality of its carrier. They can also calculate exactly what proportion of the natural variation in the measured parameter is determined by this set of letters – "loci" – in the genome.

If the dear reader does not see an ethical problem here yet, he just needs to think for a few more seconds.

"How gay are you?"

One day, bioinformatician Joseph Vitti opened a link sent to him by an acquaintance, and everything inside him seemed to turn upside down. It was a smartphone app with the alluring title "How Gay Are You?" (How Gay Are You?).

A big popular article in Nature (Amy Maxmen, Controversial ‘gay gene’ app provokes fears of a genetic Wild West) begins with this collision, dedicated to the ethical aspects of genomic research, especially their not too competent use by the general public. 

We have written about the history of attempts to link human sexuality (especially the so-called "orientation") with genes more than once, most recently in the article "Sodom and Genetics". All jokes are joked, sarcasm has dried up, and it's stupid to return to the topic – so we decided when the last and most extensive study on this topic, GWAS of same–sex sex, was published at the end of August this year. Moreover, its result is not sensational: the sign of "orientation" is polygenic, but several genetic loci affect it significantly, and in total genes determine from 8% to 25% of variation on this trait. Predicting sexuality by genes is still impossible, the authors wrote in the article.

So, then we did not see an infopod in this article. However, Joel Bellenson, an American living in Uganda, saw it as an entrepreneurial opportunity. He released an app with a provocative name: everyone can upload their genome data there (obtained, for example, from the company 23andMe), the program will analyze the loci noted in the genome-wide study and give an answer: you are, they say, closer to hetero than to homo, but the question remains for you. This is exactly what turned the insides of bioinformatician Joseph Vitti, an openly gay man.

The irony was added by the fact that the creator of the app Bellenson lives in Uganda, where same-sex sex is jailed for life. In vain he defended himself that if the government decided to identify homosexuals, it would be much easier to do it by the activity of a person in social networks than by genes. The outraged Vitti inflated a big public fuss, stressing that the application is simply incorrect: the authors of the article themselves said that their data did not allow them to predict sexuality, and the app allegedly did just that. 

23andMe urgently removed the application from their website, stipulating that the genome data is the property of their client, and he is actually free to upload them wherever he wants. But we are talking about the fact that many commercial companies offer users to interpret their genome data, while pretty much going beyond the precisely established facts of science. Our Russian "Genotek", for example, offers the test customer to learn about their innate talents by genes, sports in which they are more likely to succeed, to make an ideal diet and training program. It can be considered a nice game, like horoscopes, designed to attract people's attention to the new possibilities of genomics. But if you wish, you can also consider it disinformation – let's hope that it is absolutely harmless.

Until the first Ugandan gay man went to jail based on genomic analysis.

The genes of poverty, unemployment and Trumpism

Sociogenomics makes it possible to understand much better the interaction of genes and society in the formation of a person's personality and his destiny. However, it also creates the basis for discrimination against people on a basis over which they have no control – their genome. This is all the more bad because life itself has been discriminating against them on the same basis for more than a century.

Abdel Abdellaoui and his colleagues from Australia, the Netherlands and England studied the genomes of people living in former coal mining areas of the UK. The last of the mines closed in 2015, and many residents of mining towns fled from unemployment to other regions. And someone stayed. 

Geneticists looked specifically at those who remained, and saw many features in their genomes. Including those that we wrote about in that long–ago article "The Secret of the binary genome" - the genes noticed in connection with learning success were much weaker than on average. This is not surprising: there are more carriers of such genes among educated people, and after the closure of the mines they easily found work in other places. The inhabitants of the emptying mining villages were less likely to have genes associated with high social status and high IQ. It is curious that alleles correlating with support for the UK's exit from the European Union were more common among them: yes, sociogenomics is also able to isolate such genes.

You can spend a lot of words trying to explain why these results make you uncomfortable. For example, you can think about genetic testing of children from these villages: those who do not have "bad" alleles should be sent to good boarding schools, and carriers of "double genes" should be left – let them live on welfare and go to the sidelines in national costumes to preserve regional identity.

Geneticists offer their arguments in response. Yes, a child's academic success can be partly predicted by his genes, but a much more reliable predictive sign is his school performance over the previous year. Besides genes, there are many things in life that we cannot change. For example, the past. Or parents. Or the homeland. Or the policy of the long-retired government, because of which the inhabitants of English mining villages have been subjected to negative selection for several decades. 

What problems philosophers, sociologists and geneticists are discussing today in connection with the phenomenon of "sociogenomics" can be read in English in the Nature review (David Adam, The promise and peril of the new science of social genomics). The discussion is in full swing, but we will allow ourselves to predict some of its results. No sociogenomics, no science, and no knowledge by themselves push humanity towards eugenics, segregation, or any other fascist abomination to which people have shown a tendency throughout their history. Knowledge is harmless until it falls into the hands of a scoundrel. We just need to not let the scoundrels influence our lives in any way, and the future will be radiant.

And how to distinguish scoundrels? It is not necessary to decipher the genome for this: they can be seen quite well by other signs.

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