University of Utah One Step Closer to "Fixing" Gay People?

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Researchers at the University of Utah have been fiddling with the brains of female worms to see if they can turn them lezzie by doing a little genetic switcheroo. With funding from the National Science Foundation, researchers in scientific director Erik Jorgensen's lab switched on the gene that makes the body develop male structures, but they only activated it in the brain. As a result, the female worms still had female bodies, but they behaved like males.

"It suggests sexual behavior is encoded in our genes" and not caused by extra nerve cells specific to males or females, Jorgensen said in a telephone interview. In case you didn't know, worms and humans actually share many of the same genes, so nematodes are often used to as a potential looking glass into human genetics. The ability to genetically manipulate female worms so that they're attracted to one another reinforces the hypothesis that sexual orientation is hard-wired in the human brain, and also implies the possibility of someday "correcting" homosexual orientation in humans. Of course, that wasn't the purpose of the study, and scientifically it's not that simple, but it's hard not to imagine this kind of research someday leading to genetic sex changes. But Jorgensen said the study is not likely to resolve the burning question about the genesis of sexual orientation in humans. "A human's brain is much more complex than a worm's brain," he said.

Many scientists think a host of factors such as genetics, hormones and environment may play a role in determining sexual orientation in humans, but this has not been proven.

Jorgensen said the study is interesting because it suggests rather than being caused by extra, sex-specific nerve cells, attraction behaviors are part of the same brain circuit. In the dystopian, futuristic version of this, I can imagine government mandated (this study was funded, for what it's worth, by the National Science Foundation) genetic sex changes for gay people (maybe even in utero). In the romantic comedy version, I can see Sarah Jessica Parker playing the role of the jaded, middle-aged woman who's sick of looking for Mr. Right, and instead opts for a genetic tweak a la Kissing Jessica Stein.

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