Who is dean hamer

Strengthening the case that male homosexuality is linked to the X chromosome is the fact that the same chromosome is known to contain the genes for hemophilia and color blindness, two characteristics that are observed almost exclusively in males.

Next, Hamer recruited pairs of gay brothers and began searching their X chromosomes for genetic markers-identical stretches of DNA, the molecule of which genes are composed.

By chance, half the pairs of brothers could be expected to have inherited matching X chromosomes from their mother, who has two X chromosomes. Get my own profile Cited by View all All Since Citations h-index 74 29 iindex Public access. View all. Articles Cited by Public access. Title Sort Sort by citations Sort by year Sort by title. Annual review of biochemistry 55 1 , , American journal of medical genetics 96 2 , , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 81 11 , , Journal of Biological Chemistry 27 , , There were a lot of the anti-gay people, especially the religious people who were infuriated by the research, because it is their firm belief that people choose to be gay, and it is a bad choice, and that's what makes it a sin.

Therefore this research couldn't possibly be right. Dean Hamer: [] Then there were also people, gay people, who were very concerned that the research would be misused, and that gay fetuses would be aborted, and that the military would be doing secret testing.

They were very concerned about that as well. It was a very, very split and controversial reaction at the time. Mason Funk: I recently, just in the last couple of years, I was in a conversation with a straight colleague, and he's very progressive and he's like, "Who gives a fuck whether there's a gay gene or not.

Mason Funk: [] If people want to be gay, they should be able to be gay. Did you have thoughts similar to that or? Dean Hamer: My view has always been that gay rights is a fundamental human right and that civil rights should never depend on biology. First of all, because that's not why we have rights, it's not because of our biology, it's because we as human beings have decided that we have certain fundamental inalienable rights,. Dean Hamer: [] amongst which are freedom, liberty and the right to pursuit of happiness, and sexuality is a big part of that.

On the other hand, I also think that it's important to know whether there is a gay gene, 'cause it's important to know the truth. What has always hurt gay people is lack of knowledge, mis-education, untruth. Untruths like you choose to be that way.

Untruths like it's spreadable, you'll teach other people to be homosexual. Untruths like. It's always important to know the truth. I think it's especially important to know the truth about sexuality, not just for gay people, but for straight people too. Because this is first of all, what preoccupies our minds a lot of the time. Second of all, what drives our existence as human beings. I think it's really important to know.

Let me speak about that. Of course, the question to me as a scientist is. Dean Hamer: [] not what's your attitude about the gay gene, or what you think should happen, but what effect does the knowledge actually have. I believe in facts and figures, and so for me the question is, knowing about the gay gene a good thing or a bad thing?

We can actually answer that question, because it turns out there's a huge body of survey information, because since ,. Dean Hamer: [] the Gallup Poll of the entire United States has been asking the question, do you think that being gay is a choice?. No, excuse me, since , the Gallop Poll has been asking, do you think that people are born gay, or do you think it's influenced by other factors like their environment?

They've been asking that since '77, a long time. Then they ask the same people questions like do you think it's moral to be gay? Dean Hamer: [] Or do you think there should be gay marriage? We actually had this huge body of knowledge of what effect knowing about a gay gene has had on people. Very interesting. In , the vast majority of people thought that being gay was a choice and that you weren't born gay. At that time also, the large majority of people thought it was immoral and wrong, and that people should be put in jail for sodomy basically.

Switch to today,. Dean Hamer: [] , a slight majority of people think that being gay is not a choice and that you're born that way. A substantial majority think that it's okay to be gay. They might not like it, but it should be legal at a bare minimum. Then when you break down the data it's really fascinating. It turns out that your beliefs about the origins of sexual orientation are the number one determining factor of your thoughts about gay rights.

Dean Hamer: [] It's more important than whether you identify as born again. It's more important than your religion. It's more important than your sex or your education or where you're from or anything else, most important factor. The biggest mark of that is that if you ask people, do you think being gay is natural or do you think that it's forced upon people?

People that think it's natural believe in gay rights, they believe in same-sex marriage, etc, etc. Dean Hamer: [] It should be illegal to be gay, which would put me, my interviewer, everybody in this house and a whole lot of other people in jail right now. This knowledge about the origins of sexual orientation has very important correlates in the public discussion about sexuality. Ultimately that has big effects on the laws and on the regulations that govern our lives.

Dean Hamer: [] In that indirect way it does have an effect. I'll emphasize again, biology should not determine anything about our rights. It will probably turn out that bestiality and pedophilia have some genetic roots in them, and that doesn't mean that it's okay to abuse children or to abuse animals.

We make those decisions based on fundamental principles about human rights. That's the way it should be for LGBT rights as well. Mason Funk: [] My mind is flooded with questions. First question, I thought, and I think a lot of people would say that the number one determinant in a shift public opinion has not been a conversation about the gay gene, but the fact that AIDS forced a gazillion people out of the closet and suddenly, everybody knew someone who was gay.

I had no doubt that the driving force Mason Funk: Could you just, before you give me back your response, frame that thought in the context of the overall discussion. The knowledge about the origins of sexual orientation is very important in people's attitudes about gay rights in general. What has brought gay rights out of the closet, so to speak, has been people coming out. A lot of people were forced out because of AIDS. Other people have come out because everybody else is coming out, and so it's okay to do that now.

Other people have come out because they were incredibly brave and bold and they were pioneers in this respect. Dean Hamer: [] That's what's allowed the conversation to bloom. That's what has allowed straight people to know gay people who were always in their lives but they might not have known who were gay. That is absolutely the driving force behind liberation. Within that context, I think that the fact that we now understand more about why people are gay is an important factor.

Mason Funk: Do you think, and this is pure speculation, but do you think maybe it's kind of a one, two punch or a combination where someone suddenly knows that their office worker or their cousin is gay? Connie Florez: [] Would you want some water? Dean Hamer: I'm okay. Connie Florez: Would you want? Dean Hamer: The one thing I've learned from my scientific career is that almost nothing complicated has a single cause, and that is certainly true for the progress in LGBT rights.

There are a lot of different factors that are going on, and they interact with each other. The fact that you see somebody on TV that's gay and they're okay is one thing,. Dean Hamer: [] and then that makes you more remediable to realize, oh, that guy at work that's always talking about the opera, maybe he is gay and that's okay.

Then you read in the New York Times that it's not a choice, 'cause some scientist had done something. I think all of those operate together very much. Ultimately, you don't have gay liberation until you have changed culture, and changing culture is definitely dependent on a lot of different factors. I think those have all worked together.

Dean Hamer: [] here in the United States at least. It's also possible for factors to work together in a bad direction. Connie Florez: Plane. Mason Funk: Plane, sorry. Dean Hamer: A plane, yeah. Mason Funk: I thought I was checking the camera, then I realized it was a plane.

Connie Florez: No, plane. Mason Funk: Thank you for that. Dean Hamer: Yeah, multifactorial stuff is always the most difficult. Dean Hamer: Everybody wants to claim that their research is the most important. What I was saying about Mason Funk: [crosstalk] in binary. Dean Hamer: In binary terms, yeah. But in that research in the survey research that was Mason Funk: [] One second, 'cause we've probably one sec here so hold that thought.

Dean Hamer: Probably not. Mason Funk: Probably not. It's a little technical. Connie Florez: Still in there. I hear a second plane. Connie Florez: Yeah, let me hold it now. Mason Funk: Did you have it Dean Hamer: I think I, yeah, you go. My question was for the record, because this initial paper generated so much controversy, in layman terms, what did that paper actually say?

Dean Hamer: Our original research was actually pretty simple. We looked a bunch of families of gay men and asked about their gay relatives, and noticed there was a pattern that most of the gay relatives were on the mother's side of the family. For geneticists, that's very interesting because one possible explanation was that there was a gene on the X chromosome.

Dean Hamer: [] Remember that women pass on one of their two X chromosomes to their son, and so if a gene is on the X chromosome, it always comes down the mother's side of the family. That was really interesting. The most important observation was we then followed up and looked for actual DNA sequences on the X chromosome that were associated with sexual orientation.

To do that, we got a bunch of gay brothers, 44 pairs of gay brothers. Dean Hamer: [] We looked at their DNA up and down the X chromosome using these polymorphic markers and the new cutting edge technology that had just become available. We found that over most of the X chromosome, they were just randomly assorted, but there was one specific region called Xq28 that the gay brothers shared far more often than expected by chance.

When we looked at their straight brothers, they usually didn't have that region. That told us there's some gene in that part of the chromosome that is somehow tipping the scales,. Dean Hamer: [] and making these guys more likely to be gay. That became, somewhat misnomed, the gay gene, and that was the most exciting result of our work, because it showed for the first time at a molecular level that there was something specific in the genes that could be associated with being gay.

When that research came out, it caused a huge sensation. It was on the front page of every paper, not just in the United States, but all around the world. Dean Hamer: [] I was on every news show. I got on the Oprah Show. I did Ted Koppel, all of that. At that time, it was still very controversial, and they almost always called in at least one religious leader to explain why this couldn't possibly be right.

Or even if it was right, it didn't make being gay right, etc. It really caused quite a commotion. There was even a Broadway Musical, Twilight of the Golds, about the topic and about what would happen if people knew about a gay gene. Dean Hamer: [] I think that was when I realized that if I was going to do this type of research, I could not just sit back as a scientist and let the world digest it.

That I really needed to take responsibility not just for getting the research right, but for getting the interpretation right as well. Because the reporters just weren't quite up to it. They hadn't dealt with this issue before. There was so much political pressure on both sides. Dean Hamer: [] that the conversation really got away from the facts, and got into the realm of speculation.

I thought I should set the record straight. I decided that I should do a book about this. I didn't want to just do articles and stuff, I wanted to do a book because I felt it's a big topic and that's what I wanted to take. Besides Kinsey, he always wrote books. That's what was important. I found a writer who was really good, a newsman, Peter Copeland, who was a great reporter,. Dean Hamer: [] cause I wasn't really sure how to write for a general public.

We found a publisher and I set out to write a book. That turned into The Science of Desire. I tried to use that book format to begin making our arguments for what the science meant, what the science didn't mean, and what the possible interpretations were. I realized that's an important form of activism in itself, is to really interpret what these complex scientific issues are and to get that out into public knowledge.

Mason Funk: [] Sorry, just one side note. At a certain point, this card is going to fill up, I don't know, I don't know Connie Florez: I'm watching it. It goes [crosstalk] 30 minutes. Mason Funk: You can see, okay, cool. Mason Funk: Somehow we have to segue into the topic of the so-called god gene as well. I'm not quite sure what a great segue is if there is one. Dean Hamer: Okay, right. Mason Funk: I find that fascinating, 'cause religion has played a very important role in my life.

I've always wondered, I just felt it's like an orientation. Dean Hamer: [] Yeah, yeah, right. Mason Funk: As a side step, when did the conversation of the so-called god gene flow into your life and how? Dean Hamer: As a result of the research I'd done on sexual orientation, I got interested more generally in behavioral genetics.

If genes are partially determining or affecting our sexuality, what else could they affect? A lot of people were looking at specific diseases like schizophrenia,. Dean Hamer: [] but I'm more interested in the wide general range of behaviors. We began studying a couple of behaviors, and I was lucky to work with some folks at NIH that were looking at anxiety. We found a gene that affected anxiety. It's actually the gene that makes the protein that's affected by Prozac, it's sort of a molecular Prozac.

That was interesting. We found another gene that was associated with novelty seeking, whether you like to do new things. It's a gene that controls the proteins that are affected by the dopamine drugs,. Dean Hamer: [] all the drugs you take for attention deficit disorder, so also about attention. At some point, I began to wonder what else do genes control? I was talking with a psychologist friend of mine, [inaudible], he said, You know, I'm working on a scale to measure spirituality.

I was like, "Spirituality, that's not genetic. Dean Hamer: [] people pray a lot more often that they have sex, so I think it's more important.

How much can you get outside of yourself? It's called self-transcendence. We figured, hey, if you can measure it and it's heritable, let's look for a gene for it. We started looking for a gene that was associated with that. Dean Hamer: [] Once again it got misnamed as the god gene, which it's not really.

We even found genes that maybe associated with people's sense of spirituality. The fact that sexuality is affected by genes shouldn't surprise anybody. In fact, many of our behavioral traits and our beliefs and our psychology are influenced by genes. After all, it's genes that build up the blueprints for our brains. It's genes that make our brains interpret information the way they do. It's not too surprising that genes affect a lot of.

Dean Hamer: [] the traits that we might think of as purely psychological. They're really products of our brain. Mason Funk: But, I mean, I don't know it works, but you ended up writing a book about that as well. Why do you laugh? Dean Hamer: I would say my book on the god gene had a lot of interesting information, but it was pressing the science to the outer limits, I would say. In the sense that spirituality is such an amorphous trait, that you have to be very careful.

Dean Hamer: [] because it's so easy to confuse with religion or other specifics that probably have no genetic control whatsoever. Sex is easy. Sex drive, that's kind of straight forward. Belief in a higher power, that's a lot more amorphous and you can't even think about it without language and constraints. Mason Funk: Sorry, we have to hold.

Mason Funk: That's a jet. Connie Florez: I want to stop. Mason Funk: [] I guess my question is carry on about the book but, yeah. Dean Hamer: There's a spectrum amongst behavioral traits. Sexual orientation, at least in men, is relatively simple. Most people are either they're gay or they're not gay. They know it from an early age, and it's easy to quantitate that difference.

At the other end of the spectrum is something like spirituality,. Dean Hamer: [] where it's very much of a spectrum. You can't say you either are spiritual or not, everybody has some spirituality. It's hugely influenced by your environment, very clearly.

The religion that you are has nothing to do with your genes and everything to do with your upraising. That's very much at the complex end of the spectrum. For geneticists, it's much easier to study the simple stuff, because we have simple measuring tools, yes or nos.

We can do the stats really easily. Something like spirituality is,. Dean Hamer: [] I would say, at the very edge of scientific study ability, without doing actual brain scans of people as they meditate or are religious, I think it's pretty complicated.

Mason Funk: Why did you decide to write that book? I think you even gave it a title that includes the god gene, as opposed to be more subtle like The Science of Desire. Dean Hamer: Let's just say, I almost dedicated that book to Visa, because that was the year I had an inappropriately young and expensive boyfriend,. I actually proposed two books to my publisher at that time.

One was about the sequencing of the human genome and the race that had gone on and the other was the god gene. They thought the god gene was more interesting. I thought for me, it was an opportunity to explore what I think is still a great frontier in biology, which is how the brain works. This is the big question for future generations. Dean Hamer: [] This was an opportunity for you to start studying one of the oldest, the strongest attributes of men.

I think it was interesting that people really don't always understand the difference between spirituality and religion, and that was really a fascinating topic. Even if we are very far from a molecular understanding, I think it was a topic that's worth studying from a scientific perspective.

Indeed, about a year or two after that, there's a whole flurry of books about the biological basis of spirituality. It became kind of a popular topic, really. Mason Funk: [] Okay, excellent.

Let me check into my list of questions. Did you feel like you talked Regarding your books, you wanted to specifically talk about the book you wrote, The Science of Desire. Dean Hamer: Yeah, what's been interesting about being an author is that I think that if we have knowledge, but it's not communicated in a way that's accessible to the public,. Dean Hamer: [] then we've really done a disservice to the knowledge. We've done a disservice to science, we've done a disservice to the people.

I think scientific knowledge is really important, and even though there's a popular trend to discount the entire scientific methodology, I think that that's just a trend and will disappear. That the power of knowledge is to inform people and to educate people. I think that we as scientists have, if not an obligation, at least a great opportunity to participate in that,.

Dean Hamer: [] and that's why I've always felt that it's important to figure out how do you communicate science? How do you communicate facts? How do you communicate reality in a way that's accessible to ordinary people? I don't know if I've done the best job.

My books are probably mostly accessible to people that are going to college and that watch PBS and the like, but at least that's a big swath in the population, that makes a difference. Mason Funk: [] Now, we can't move on just because you've lived through it, you've lived through it obviously, the AIDS epidemic. How did that affect you both on a purely personal level and also professionally?

I think it awakened us all up to the real perils of homophobia. That it wasn't just about whether we could be out at work or whether we could get married, it was about people's lives. It struck all gay men. All my friends were afraid.

I was afraid, everybody and so on. The government was so afraid that they refused to allow needle exchange. They refused to allow any education in the schools. They refused to allow the most basic public health measures that any logical person would support. They refused that in the Washington, D. Dean Hamer: [] even when our own government officials and even when our own health people and the people at the clinic were willing to do that. Washington, D.

It's terrible. Several other scientists were investigating the cause of homosexuality. In Simon Levay, at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla, California, found differences in size for a region of the brain between homosexual and heterosexual men.

Levay argued that differences in brain sizes between homosexual and heterosexual men could indicate that homosexuality results from genetic factors rather than environmental ones.

Later in John Michael Bailey, at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, published results about the genetic heritability of homosexuality. Bailey found that both monozygotic and dizygotic twins were more likely to be homosexual than were other related siblings. Since twins share the same DNA, Bailey claimed that the cause of homosexuality was genetical and not environmental.

Many people had argued that homosexuality was a result of a diseased or pathological mental state caused by environmental factors. The team conducted their experiments seven miles away at the National Institutes of Health. The team also recruited a second sample of thirty-eight homosexual brothers, since brothers share much of their DNA, along with their parents or available relatives. Sexual orientation was self-reported and categorized basedon the Kinsey scale, a heterosexual-homosexual rating scale that Alfred Kinsey, who worked on human sexuality at Indiana University on Bloomington, Indiana, had developed during the first half of the twentieth century.

Hamer and his collaborators noted that although the Kinsey scale rated sexual orientation on a spectrum, the study treated sexual orientation as distinctly two categories, homosexual or heterosexual, to avoid irrelevant or confounding variables in their data.

Hamer admitted that while the method of categorizing individuals as either homosexual or heterosexual was overly simplistic, it reliably represented the men in the study. Based on previous research, Hamer hypothesized that homosexuality was a trait that inherited genetically through the maternal lines. To investigate the maternal inheritance of homosexuality, Hamer and his team analyzed the family tree and DNA of families of homosexual men.

Subjects donated blood samples for the DNA analysis and completed questionnaires about personal childhood gender identification, childhood and adolescent development, adult sexual behavior, mental health history, and a medical genetic screen.

Hamer and his team collected the family histories from the homosexual men recruited. The participants rated the homosexuality of their fathers, sons, brothers, uncles, and male cousins based on the Kinsey rating scale. Researchers then tested the reliability of those ratings by verifying with the relatives of those men the sexual orientations of their family members.