Fayner Posts: At first I thought this was a story about Gene Simmons being homosexual. I was like, what the fuck?!! And then I actually started reading this and found it ain’t about that at all.
But read it ’cause it is quite interesting. The Catholic Church is prolly looking for the “drug” in question to get all their people off the Homo Train…
A new study is providing insights into the genetics of homosexuality — at least in fruit flies.
Researchers have discovered a gene involved in homosexual behavior in the tiny flies. They also found a way to turn homosexuality on and off with drugs.
Featherstone and colleagues described their findings in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
After a century of study on fruit flies, researchers have accumulated a vast storehouse of genetic knowledge. UIC researchers were using fruit flies to study muscular dystrophy when they discovered a gene they call “gender blind,” or GB.
Flies with a mutated form of the GB gene are bisexual. It appears they’re unable to distinguish chemical smells, called pheromones, that tell whether other flies are male or female.
“The GB mutant males treated other males exactly the same way normal male flies would treat a female,” Featherstone said. “They even attempted copulation.”
The GB mutation appears to strengthen nerve cell junctions called synapses. This causes flies to over-react to pheromones. As a result, they “broaden their horizons and go for both males and females,” Featherstone said.
Researchers tested this idea by adding a drug to the flies’ apple juice. The drug weakened the synapses. So within a few hours, flies with the GB mutation stopped engaging in homosexual behavior.
Conversely, researchers gave heterosexual male flies a drug that strengthened their synapses. Sure enough, these male flies soon were courting males as well as females.
“It was amazing,” 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.”