That “sploof”-y noise you just heard was my head exploding upon attempting to imagine the medical ethics debate in the works if the research mentioned in this blog post by John Tierney extends one day to humans:
To their surprise, neurobiologists have discovered that homosexuality can be turned on or off in fruit flies. They’d known that sexual orientation can be genetically programmed, but they didn’t realize it could also be altered by giving a drug that changes the way the flies’ sensory circuits react to pheromones.
Within hours of the treatment, previously heterosexual male fruit flies would be courting other males, and treatment could also cause flies who had been engaging in homosexual behavior to become exclusively heterosexual, the neurobiologists report in Nature Neuroscience. You can read a summary of it here from the University of Illinois at Chicago, the home of one of the researchers, David Featherstone.
“It was amazing,” Dr. Featherstone said. “I never thought we’d be able to do that sort of thing, because sexual orientation is supposed to be hard-wired. This fundamentally changes how we think about this behavior.”
When hearing about this, a couple of thoughts come to mind.
First, in the U.S., we’ve seemed to reach a point where Joe Average American tolerates, but is uncomfortable with, homosexuality in others, at least outside the scope of religious matters. The last figures I recall seeing suggested that a slight majority of Americans were OK with the idea of civil unions (but not same-gender marriage)…although the geographic distribution of that slight majority is somewhat uneven.
We seem to be reaching a point where Americans accept the notion that one does not choose his/her/hir own orientation, and Joe Average American seems to work with the concept of “that’s the way they’re made” as a path towards tolerance.
The possibility that someone can say “they’re made that way…but it can be fixed” would only seem likely to stoke the fires on the long-burning debate.
Second…I’m not sure I can even begin to think about some of the ethical questions that could arise if one day, a doctor could say, “take the blue pill if you want to be straight; take the red pill if you want to be gay; or take the pink-and-purple-polka-dotted pill if you want to be like Captain Jack Harkness“.
Gah; now I have an urge to go watch X-Men: The Last Stand
