Scientists Say New DNA Saliva Test Can Predict Who’s Gay

Born this way? Scientists are looking at the DNA of gay men and again are finding biological, not environmental, reasons people are gay or straight.

Many people are familiar with the iconic double helix (above) that represents what our DNA looks like. The search for the “gay gene” has been going on for years, to no avail, giving anti-gay activists false fuel to insist being gay is a bad moral choice. Of course, even if it were a choice, and the vast, vast majority of LGBT people say it’s not, there still would be nothing immoral about it.

On Thursday at the American Society of Human Genetics annual meeting scientists presented a study they say offers a 67 percent accurate test that can be performed on saliva, to determine if someone is gay or straight. They haven’t mentioned bisexuality or varying degrees of sexuality.

These researchers, led by Tuck Ngun, a former postdoctoral fellow at UCLA, say there may not be a gay gene, but chemical “switches” that attach to DNA effectively turn on or off a particular gene, and thus a person’s homosexuality or heterosexuality. Testing for these five particular epigenetic switches, they say, can reveal a person’s sexuality.

Buzzfeed reports that “Ngun, who is gay, agrees that this research is in its infancy, and says he has no intention of making a commercial test to predict sexuality. Still, he’s worried about the potentially ominous implications of his work — so much so, in fact, that he has decided to leave the field.

“It kind of, honestly, became a little bit troubling to me, what I was actually doing,” Ngun told BuzzFeed News. “Having done this now, I could sort of foresee a not-so-happy outcome.”

The science is often tested on identical twins because their genes are similar – but not, contrary to many media reports, identical, as Scientific American reports. The anti-gay right wrongly insists identical twins genes are identical to claim, again, that being gay is a bad moral choice. 

Some researchers are skeptical of the study, citing a small sample size. Ngun tested only 37 pairs of male twins, one identifying as gay, one identifying as straight.

While the media is heralding this as a new development, it’s really not.

In 2012 NCRM reported on a similar study of epigenetics switching on and off genes that “make” someone heterosexual or homosexual.

If all this seems confusing, here’s a great video that explains the science in easy to understand terms.

 

Image by Christoph Bock (Max Planck Institute for Informatics) via Wikimedia