As the PBS NewsHour has reported previously, a GWAS study scans the DNA of hundreds or thousands of individuals, looking for common patterns that correspond with our health or our behaviors. With this genetic trove available, the researchers conducted what’s known as a genome-wide association study, or GWAS. All of the subjects consented to this research, including those pulled from 23andMe’s archives.Ī GWAS study scans the DNA of hundreds or thousands of individuals, looking for common patterns that correspond with our health or our behaviors. About 26,800 individuals - or 5 percent of the subjects - fit this description, which is similar to the percentage reported across society more generally. This study pulled the information for 477,500 people across the UK Biobank and 23andMe who had taken a survey about various life behaviors, including whether they had engaged in a sexual experience with a person of the same sex at any point in their life. It contains the DNA sequences of 500,000 middle-aged people, who were 40 to 69 years old when they were recruited between 20. The UK Biobank was established in 2007 by the medical charity The Wellcome Trust as a resource for research. With a reported 9 million users in its database, 23andMe is arguably the most popular, direct-to-consumer DNA testing company on the planet. The study set out to investigate a 20-year-old genetics debate in sexuality by combing through two huge collections of DNA profiles: the UK Biobank and 23andMe.
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“But that doesn’t mean we know how to manipulate sexual orientation mentally.” What the scientists did We knew that before this study.” said Bailey, citing the well-defined role that life experiences play in sexual development. “Obviously, there are environmental causes of sexual orientation. People like Michael Bailey, a psychologist at Northwestern University who conducted much of the early research into the heritability of sexuality, warned against taking this new genetics study - or any research on sexual behavior - out of context.įor instance, Bailey added, there is no evidence that things like conversion therapy work. Of course, ethical concerns arise with any attempt to use biology to explain complex human behavior like sexuality. In other words, the team only looked at the “LGB” within the acronym LGBTQIA+. It is worth keeping in mind that this study only covers some types of sexuality - gay, lesbian and cis-straight - but doesn’t offer many insights into gender identity. But polygenic traits can be strongly influenced by the environment, meaning there’s no clear winner in this “nature versus nurture” debate. (Things like red/green colorblindness, freckles and dimples can be traced back to single genes). That pattern is similar to other heritable (but complex) characteristics like height or a proclivity toward trying new things. Moreover, the researchers found that sexuality is polygenic - meaning hundreds or even thousands of genes make tiny contributions to the trait. Genetic heritability - all of the information stored in our genes and passed between generations - can only explain 8 to 25 percent of why people have same-sex relations, based on the study’s results. The study shows that genes play a small and limited role in determining sexuality. Sexuality cannot be pinned down by biology, psychology or life experiences, this study and others show, because human sexual attraction is decided by all these factors. “Just to give you a sense of the scale of data, this is approximately 100 times bigger than any previous study on this topic.” “This is not a first study exploring the genetics of same-sex behavior, but the previous studies were small and underpowered,” Andrea Ganna, the study’s co-author and genetics research fellow at the Broad Institute and Mass General Hospital, said in a press briefing on Wednesday. In its stead, the report finds that human DNA cannot predict who is gay or heterosexual. The study of nearly a half million people closes the door on the debate around the existence of a so-called “gay gene.” That’s the first thing you need to know about the largest genetic investigation of sexuality ever, which was published Thursday in Science. There is no single gene responsible for a person being gay or a lesbian.
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