Sex, flies and CSI

Scientists are worried that the public is watching too much CSI (all versions including probably a musical, according to science writer Steve Mirsky) and this may be bad news for science. Now you, seated on a couch during primetime cable, can manage a wrinkled forehead that fosters an intelligent posture and insist to the TV actors/actresses – "Why don’t you look at the DNA?" And of course, the CSI scientists will hear this enlightening suggestion from you and they will accordingly find a match in the DNA and the murder mystery is thus solved within an hour and the only thing required from you to come up with this brilliant suggestion is that you look "thoughtful" and know at least three letters in the alphabet – DNA. This has earned DNA some sort of a "solve-all key" reputation in the public’s minds: if you want to know how all of Nature works, ask DNA.

Francis Crick really said they have discovered "the secret of life" when he and James Watson discovered the double helical structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) in 1953. Since then, biology has made inroads in the field of genetics. Now knowing that DNA contains materials that living things begin with to live their lives, science could now go in and find out how it works. This has truly helped us understand more about how our most intimate biographies, written in our cells, play a role in our lives, particularly with diseases that are hereditary. This has also spawned research on genes that could account for personality traits and behavior, particularly on something very controversial as sexuality. While scientists are always aware of the limitations of their research on the link between genes and sexuality, the public usually reads to it only what is seductive to their own personal agenda. This is where biological truths coming from the seat of our cells can breed fallacies too – the fallacy that what we are made of as written in our molecular diary totally defines who we are. A very recent experiment published in the journal Cell and also reported by Elisabeth Rosenthal of the International Herald Tribune for the New York Times last June 3, give us clues as to this murky and complex domain of genes and sexuality.

If animals had agents to book them for experiments, then the agent of Drosophila or the fruit fly would have made it to the list of billionaire-flies in the insect version of the Fortune Magazine already. The fruit fly, along with the nematode (worm), is the top contender for the title of being the most studied animal in scientific experiments and this recent experiment reported is another banner on the fly’s wall. Flies and worms are relatively easy to study since they have genes that number only in the single-digit thousand (humans have about 25,000). This makes it easier for scientists to study relationships between genes and diseases or behavior which in this case is: what genes account for sexual behavior and preference? Aside from a peculiar interest in the sexuality of fruit flies, scientists do this also to gain an insight into the relationship between human genes and sexuality but always being aware that they cannot make a one-on-one direct transfer of conclusions from what is true of flies to what may be true in humans.

This is what the experiment headed by Dr. Barry Dickson, senior scientist at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, found in sum: a master-gene responsible for the masculine or feminine sexual behavior of flies. When the female fly’s master sexual gene was twitched to become the male variant, the anatomically female fly behaved like a male doing all the SOPs of fruit fly courtship romance, and the male flies became interested in males when the male master sexual gene was altered to be the female variant. This is considered a very important development in the link between genetics and sexuality even if it were done on flies. It means that this "twitching" could be innate in all "sexuality" genes which may provide clues to our own sexual behaviors. It also opened the door wider to what both a direct, open observation of life and a study of human history and culture, should have already made apparent to us by now:  that one cannot simply rely on anatomy (your body part is who you are) or on the chromosomal "XY" or "XX" to totally define what makes a man or woman and how they should live their lives. 

Studies on genes and human sexuality are, of course, and expectedly so, not as clear-cut. A landmark 1994 study cited by Pinker in his book How The Mind Works (1997) by geneticist Dean Hamer "sort of" found a genetic basis for homosexuality. "Sort of" because subsequent studies to further validate it (the heart of the scientific process) did not find as high a degree of significance between the gene in question and homosexual behavior. But these subsequent studies did NOT invalidate it. If you look to what is "natural," scientists will tell you that the only formula that Nature, through our genes, offers is the myriad possibilities of traits and behaviors, sexual or not – in other words, "variety." Believe it or not, scientists were not the ones who came up with the term "homosexual" to make the public open their minds to Nature’s basic tendency to form varieties of everything and everyone. Geneticist Steve Jones who wrote Y The Descent of Men cited in his book that a German lawyer came up with the term in 1869 and even classified 46 types under it. Still, no one has a complete handle on what determines sexuality.

Another article – an interview – in the NY Times last May 31 with Dr. William G. Reiner made me deeply realize something about sexuality and genes more deeply. Dr. Reiner is a psychiatrist and urologist and known to be a leading specialist in the treatment of children with intersexual condition, those born with genitalia that are neither definitely male nor female. He said that "sexual identity is individual, unique and intuitive and that the only person who really knows what it is, is the person themselves. If we as physicians or scientists want to know about a person’s sexual identity, we have to ask them." I think this consideration uttered by Dr. Reiner shines with sparkling logic and brims with unquestionable humanity. It is far more sensible and truly loving to let someone’s sexual identity freely unfold within himself/herself, and before the world, because no one else knows what his/her innerspace (nature) and his/her own map of a life (nurture) has woven within himself/herself better than the being who is unfolding within and without. It is no less than cruel and arrogant to think or do otherwise.

I think our fear and hypocrisy toward homosexuality springs more from ignorance and laziness to find out, from science and other disciplines, what makes us who we are, biologically and culturally. To judge people according to what their DNA or what you think their XY or XX pair should give rise to in terms of lifestyle and sexual preference is to doom our humanity, the essence of being human, only as it is scribbled in acids. We are as awash in acids as we are from the other substances in our physical and emotional lives. The substance of our lives that make up the human diary is more than the compounds, mixtures and switches of our physiology. The stories of CSI would not be half as interesting if the science were not blended with the poetry of human lives.

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