http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/round-2-turning-heterosexuality-on-and-off/index.html?ex=1355115600&en=38fcd780de0fc997&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
"DECEMBER 12, 2007, 2:28 PMRound 2: Turning Heterosexuality On and Off By JOHN TIERNEY TAGS: BIOETHICS, HOMOSEXUALITY The post about using a drug to changing the sexual orientation of fruit flies — and some day, perhaps, of humans — generated lots of indignant reactions and questions about the research. I asked David Featherstone, one of the authors of the paper in Nature Neuroscience, to respond to Lab readers. Here’s what Dr. Featherstone, a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has to say: The response to our research has been fascinating, and highlights the giant gap between what neuroscientists already know and what the public believes. To other neuroscientists, the main shocker from our work is that a glial cell amino acid transporter is regulating information processing by alteringambient extracellular glutamate. According to scientific dogma, glial cells play little or no role in information processing in the brain, and ‘ambient extracellular glutamate’ is generally thought to be an experimental artifact — a sign that researchers screwed up their analytical chemistry. The fact that the processes we describe happen to regulate sexual behavior is really of little importance to most neuroscientists (although we dorky scientists are titillated as much as anyone when reading about ‘genital licking’). The fact is, ‘gay genes’ have been known to exist for a long time, in flies and other animals, including humans. Genetic links to all sorts of human traits have been identified. A widely used, extremely useful database of human traits with a genetic basis is Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM), which can be accessed here. This database has entries for devastating neurological disorders, such as schizophrenia and autism, but also things like pathological gambling, attention deficit disorder, eye color, arm folding preference, and homosexuality. Some of these conditions are things we obviously want to ‘cure’. Others are not. Regardless, information on all of them is accumulating to the point where drug treatment approaches could be designed." A drug to cure those afflicted with religion might not be far off! In the water Maru -- William T Goodall Mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web : http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk Blog : http://radio.weblogs.com/0111221/ "I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time." - Bill Gates, 1987 _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
