I hope so! Never mind the original purpose of the research. It would be a breakthrough. If scientists could figure out how to alter the “gay gene” in a person already born and grown – alter it so it actually changes the person’s sexual orientation – then it would be possible to alter all kinds of inherited characteristics of adults, including hereditary diseases. Consider the possibilities. Why, you could even . . . turn a male-to-female transsexual into exactly what he would have been if he had been conceived with two X chromosomes; an indisputably real woman, with a functioning uterus and everything.
As far as I know, there’s zero evidence for a gay gene or any single factor.
Dude, genes only work that way in Star Trek. :dubious:
Couple reasons, none of which is proof that there is no simple cause for homosexuality, but I think they’re suggestive.
First, if there was a simple cause, say one gene or environmental factor, I imagine someone would’ve identified it already.
Second, I’ve never heard the cause of any complex human behavior being reduced to a single biological or environmental cause.
Third, a lot of things seem to effect incidence of homosexuality, but none of them do so absolutely. Twin studies tell us that there is a strong biological component, but that it isn’t totally determinant. Ditto for hormones inutero. And different societies appear to have different rates of homosexuality (think ancient Greece, for example), so culture also appears to play a role.
I cannot imagine any kind of “treatment” that would change a person’s sexual orientation, except as pure behavior modification, but that would only change outward appearances and actions (for some reason the “masculizing” scene from “The Bird Cage” just came to mind.) I understand why a lot of people think homosexuality is abnormal, and it will just take a very, very long time (here in North America, anyway) for that attitude to go away – if it ever does.
I know. I said “if.” If you can change an adult’s sexual orientation by altering his/her gene code, you can change any other hereditary characteristic in the same way. If.
Funding?
If you could prevent homosexuality, there wouldn’t be any represses homosexuality, therefore no more homophobes.
I know, I know, that’s unrealistic.
Genocide.
Are you sure, I have never heard of this before? In fact I always hear the contrary; similar incidence across cultures.
If the incidence is low and even I am lead to consider the causes to be largely biological and highly susceptible to intervention, appearing only when the right combination of factors appears. Suppose then it is possible to synthesise an obstacle to one of the factors. That seems feasible.
Baffle? I’m baffled.
In the same way that other personality traits are deemed to be polygenic, i.e. intelligence, extroversion, etc.
How else would you define an effort to wipe out gays entirely?
Now that would solve some of society’s problems…
Only applies if the plan is to kill them, not if the plan is to “cure” them.
If Hitler had decided to foster all Jewish babies to gentile German families, so as to eliminate the Jewish culture and nothing else, that would not have been genocide.
Genocide: the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group.
Emphasis mine, of course.
A highly concentrated amount of concerted foolishness.
Not what the OP is talking about. It’s a long step from making a cure available to forcing people to use it inorder to inact their elimination.
And even if the cure was forced, I’m not sure it counts. I read “extermination” in your definition as “killing”. I think thats how most people think of genocide. If you convince all the Jews in the world to convert, you haven’t comited genocide, eventhough you’ve effectively destroyed their cultural group.