Now we’ve dispensed with the nonsense “gay gene” trope, let’s interrogate the way we talk about genetics and traits full stop
By Philip Ball,
Prospect
| 09. 04. 2019
Some people once felt that the reason to look for a “gay gene” was so that it could be eliminated. Under the headline “Abortion hope after ‘gay genes’,” in 1993 the Daily Mail wrote “Isolation of the genes [causing homosexuality] means it could soon be possible to predict whether a baby will be gay and give the mother the option of an abortion.”
Revisiting that reporting now it has been announced that there is no “gay gene” shows us how much has changed over less than three decades in public attitudes to homosexuality. Sadly, there has not been a comparable change in public attitudes to genes. Few would now take the abhorrent view that a genetic propensity to being gay would constitute good grounds for termination of a pregnancy, but probably many would have no problem believing that your genes could “make you gay” in the first place. This latest interrogation of genetic determinism illustrates how far we have still to go to shift the prevailing narrative about genes.
The new research, led by a team at the Broad...
Related Articles
By Emi Nietfeld, Wired | 12.11.2024
FOR YEARS NOW, aspiring parents have been designing their children. Screening embryos for disease-causing genes during IVF, selecting their future baby’s sex, picking egg and sperm donors to influence their child’s traits. Today, a lot of those “designer babies” are full-on...
By Julia Brown and Daphne Martschenko, The San Francisco Standard | 11.23.2024
“Pronatalist” parents like Simone and Malcolm Collins want it all: optimized babies – lots of them.
To achieve this goal, the influencer couple from Pennsylvania is using an emerging technology known as preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders, or PGT-P...
Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
It is hard to make predictions, especially about the future, as Yogi Berra, Niels Bohr, and other luminaries have remarked. But there are already signs that the incoming Trump administration may have some difficulty establishing consistent policies about controversial issues concerning human reproduction.
On the one hand, consider “the conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration.”
The notorious Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership seeks to delete terms such as “reproductive rights” from “every federal...
