(Gay genes in bondage? What to call these things?)

Interesting little op-ed from Nicholas Kristof on gay-love in the Wednesday Times. (Thanks to VodkaPundit for the link.)

It opens (after a brief intro about fire and brimstone reactions to a previous column suggesting homosexuality was likely genetic) with this interesting question:

Yet surprisingly few readers raised the most obvious question: if homosexuality is partly genetic, why are there so many gays?

I have always been a little puzzled by that question, but figured the main answer was because the gays were generally forced to integrate, fake it and fuck their wives and husbands sufficiently to prove their sexuality. Maybe even overcompensate.

(That still leaves some questions: wouldn't they be unlikely to have as much sex as horny heteros, thereby pushing their genetic numbers down?)

Kristoff does a decent two-minute rundown of the various genetic theories, which offer some plausible explanations. But I'm just as puzzled as he was, about him overlooking an obvious question:

If homosexuality is largely genetic, and the genes have stuck around in the gene pool by millenia of closet cases performing their marital obligations, what will happen when gayboys finally quit faking it with women, and lesbian eggs remain unfertilized?

Have Pat Robertson and the pope considered the possibility that gay marriage might be the strongest long-term strategy for eliminating us homos? If we're nothing but carriers, wouldn't they want us to pair off in procreation-free homozones?

I know I'm required to get slapped for entertaining such ideas, but surely I haven't been the only one thinking these thoughts the past several months. The odd thing for me is that our boy Nicholas tiptoed right up to it this morning and ignored it.

Big story in the Times today about the dubious methods of that Johns Hopkins researcher who admitted back in September to screwing up on the preposterous ecstasy study where 20 percent of his lab monkeys died from a normal dose.

The villian is one Dr. George A. Ricaurte, who seems hellbent to use any means necessary to "prove" ecstasy is dangerous.

The stuff in this article is incredible. I can't believe an institution like Johns Hopkins continues to back this guy. Disgraceful.

I would really like to know if drugs like ecstasy, ghb and ketamine are dangerous, how dangerous, what the risks are. Never going to get that from dishonest people like this.

And no one is ever going to trust the anti-drug campaigns until they start speaking just a little truth. It's so counterproductive.

A few of my favorite quotes:

"It's hard to trust George," said Dr. Julie Holland, a professor of

psychiatry at New York University who has edited a book on Ecstasy and wants

to test it in psychotherapy. She accused him of "playing games with his

data" to win more federal grants by making the drugs look bad.

 

Dr. Richard J. Wurtman, a prominent clinician at Harvard and M.I.T. who has

clashed with Dr. Ricaurte, accused him of "running a cottage industry

showing that everything under the sun is neurotoxic."

 

So the Big Scare study used to try to push the ridiculous RAVE act through Congress last year turns out to be bogus. From the W Post (which has a better piece than NYT):

Scientists at Johns Hopkins University who last year published a frightening and controversial report suggesting that a single evening's use of the illicit drug ecstasy could cause permanent brain damage and Parkinson's disease are retracting their research in its entirety, saying the drug they used in their experiments was not ecstasy after all.

The jury is still out on its actual dangers:

. . . But some studies have indicated that the drug can at least temporarily damage neurons that use the mood-altering brain chemical serotonin. Some users also have spiked fevers, which rarely have proven fatal. . . . Advocates of ecstasy's therapeutic potential, including a number of scientists and doctors who believe it may be useful in treating post-traumatic stress disorder or other psychiatric conditions, criticized the study.

Here's the astonishing thing, though. The mistake appears to have been innocent: the lab got to vials the same day, one of ecstasy (MDMA), the other meth, and the labels got switched. But the results were preposterous, and the scientists published them and went to Congress with them anyway. The researchers gave each monkey three doses of X, which is a bit more than most people take, but pretty common. The results:

Two of 10 animals died quickly after their second or third dose of the drug, and two others were too sick to take the third dose. Six weeks later, dopamine levels in the surviving animals were still down 65 percent. That led Hopkins team leader George Ricaurte and his colleagues to conclude that users were playing Russian roulette with their brains. . . . [But critics] wondered why large numbers of users were not dying or growing deathly ill from the drug, as the animals did, and why no previous link had been made between ecstasy and Parkinson's despite decades of use and a large number of studies.

Or as the Times put it: "If a typical Ecstasy dose killed 20 percent of those who took it, the critics said, no one would use it recreationally." Duh. This study didn't pass the most obvious sense-check. Clearly something was wildly off. Either something was done wrong, or monkeys have a completely different reaction to X than humans. Yet they decided to shock the public anyway. And of course the puritan politicians were right there behind them. Pretty irresponsible for a pack of moralists.

No wonder the audience these scientists and moralists are trying to reach is so dismissive of them. Two of my first posts when I revived this blog in June address the government's ridiculous Ecstasy ad campaign, and some solid information on the drug.

Nice! The FDA is forcing food labels to include the content of those horrible trans fats.

Finally! What takes them so long?

Will be nice to know which guilty pleasures are most damaging to me. And perhaps nicer still that the bastards will quit pumping that poison into so many foods. Now that they have to admit it, they're already starting to pull it. Frito Lay is yanking it from the Doritos, Tostitos and Cheetos recipes.

(If you're not familar, the AP story says they're at least as dangerous as saturated fats, but that's an extremely conservative statement. Data has been pouring in for years that they're worse, much worse.)