Word: hamer
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Ongoing studies of identical twins have measured achievement motivation--lab language for ambition--in identical siblings separated at birth, and found that each twin's profile overlaps 30% to 50% of the other's. In genetic terms, that's an awful lot--"a benchmark for heritability," says geneticist Dean Hamer of the National Cancer Institute. But that still leaves a great deal that can be determined by experiences in infancy, subsequent upbringing and countless other imponderables...
...experiment one provocative step further. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they reported that gay men don't respond to the chemicals the same way that straight men do. "It clearly substantiates the idea that there's a biological substrate for sexual orientation," says Dean Hamer, a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health and the author of Science of Desire: The Gay Gene and the Biology of Behavior (Simon & Schuster; 272 pages). "This is a highly significant result...
...that had been shown before. What was new in the recent experiments was the inclusion of gay men. "Gay men are a great control group for this kind of study," says Hamer, "because they're pretty much the same as straight men except for that one factor." Sure enough, when the Swedish scientists ran the experiment this time, the results were striking: when gay men were exposed to male pheromones, their hypothalamuses lit up just like a woman's. Female hormones did nothing for them...
...might be able to test the proposition, says Hamer, by doing the experiment on people at different ages, to see if the response changes after early childhood. Nobody has tried that yet. The Swedish team is currently working on a related study to test how lesbians respond to female pheromones. Last week's paper also can't answer the question of how important a role pheromones play in desire. Conventional wisdom used to be that people could not detect them...
That's because the vomeronasal organ, a pheromone-sensitive structure in the nose that's very active in mice, for example, is largely vestigial in humans. Although it now seems that pheromones are somehow involved in arousal, their role could still be minimal. Says Hamer: "They're certainly not as important as they are in the mouse, who can't rely on gawking at cheerleaders to get turned on." Still, there's no harm in taking a sniff next time you meet someone attractive--as long you do it discreetly...