homosexuality

I watched 60 Minutes this past Sunday (March 12th) and the by far the most interesting of the 3 segments was the one on homosexuality.

The segment opened up with the camera entering a child's bedroom. The decor was stereotypical boy. GI Joes and cars, camoflauge drapes, video war game posters etc. Then the camera went across the hall and entered the other child's room. The contrast was strong--now the dominant color was pink and there were cute horses on the posters and stuffed animals on the bed.

It turns out that the two rooms both belong to boys, Jared and Adam. Identical twins, in fact. Since the past few decades have been filled with research suggesting the the roots of homosexuality are primarily genetic, for two children who are genetically identical to behave in such different ways, ways that suggest different sexual orientation, is quite startling. This point was made even more clear in an interview with an older pair of identical twin boys, these were in their 20s, one straight and one gay.

As a scientist this really fascinated me. There really is a lot of evidence pointing to a genetic basis for homosexuality but having identical twins develop like this causes some problems. The 60 Minutes segment did a wonderful job of developing those questions and giving what explanations as are known. It was evident that this is new work and a lot isn't understood yet. One of the examples was that the first born son in a family bears a 2% chance of being gay, but every subsequent male child born into the family has an increasing large chance of being gay. Researchers suspect that the mechanism here is the immune system of the mother reacting the the proteins coded for by the Y chromosone but it's not proven. Weirder still is the finding, made just in the past year, that this doesn't apply to males that are left handed. They always have the base level 2% chance of being gay. And none of this applies to girls at all.

Some of the work being done in animal models was covered. Footage was shown of rat studies that bear out the relationship between maternal hormone changes in utero with sexual orientation but the most interesting part was the twin studies, particularly of the young boys. 60 Minutes also included comparisons between archival home movie footage of kids with contemporary interviews with them. These were viewed by people that then evaluated the sexual orientation of the subjects both as kids and as adults. It was shocking to see how frequently the orientation was obvious even when the kids were 5 - 10 years old.

This raises the striking question--is homosexuality just about sex? To me, this suggests that who the person chooses to have sex with is just one small fragment of what being gay really means. I guess that really should be common sense. After all, we only have sex a few hours a week--if we're lucky-- but there's a total of 168 hours in a week. Why define people so strongly by who they have sex with rather than all the other myriad factors in their life. Just a thought.

I'll probably come back to this subject later on. The idea of sexual orientation coloring our entire existance is interesting and bears some contemplation. In any case, this was a very good segment. Anyone interested should go to the 60 Minutes website and check out the video segments they have there on this.