Gays Can Be Cured! At Least, Gay Fruit Flies Can!

That's a headline some have feared for years -- would science find a "gay" gene? One that parents could search for and abort a fetus before it's born (the way people around the world abort baby girls) or perhaps just "fix?' Many took comfort in the knowledge that scientists believed something as complex as sexual orientation would be derived from many factors and not just one lone gene.

Well, the New York Times reports in an experiment on fruit flies ...

That one gene, the researchers are announcing today in the journal Cell, is apparently by itself enough to create patterns of sexual behavior - a kind of master sexual gene that normally exists in two distinct male and female variants.

In a series of experiments, the researchers found that females given the male variant of the gene acted exactly like males in courtship, madly pursuing other females. Males that were artificially given the female version of the gene became more passive and turned their sexual attention to other males.

"We have shown that a single gene in the fruit fly is sufficient to determine all aspects of the flies' sexual orientation and behavior," said the paper's lead author, Dr. Barry Dickson, senior scientist at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. "It's very surprising.

"What it tells us is that instinctive behaviors can be specified by genetic programs, just like the morphologic development of an organ or a nose."

The results are certain to prove influential in debates about whether genes or environment determine who we are, how we act and, especially, our sexual orientation, although it is not clear now if there is a similar master sexual gene for humans.

Humans are much more complicated, of course. And one should point out these are FRUIT flies we're talking about, after all. But is this a positive development? (See, it is genetic!) Or is it negative? (See, it can be cured!)

Actually, it's neither -- it's simply an apparent advance in human knowledge, one that could be confirmed or clarified or proven misleading down the road. Yes, people can abuse science or jump to silly conclusions based on one study. But only fools fear finding out the world is round or circles the sun or that the earth is more than 50,000 years old, etc. Let's leave fear and hatred of science to the fundies.