I am reminded of a talk by David Suzuki that I was fortunate to see in the late 80’s or early 90’s. At the time, there was a researcher at a Canadian university (forgive my haziness on the details here) that was conducting an extremely controversial study in which he was trying to scientifically determine physical and cognitive differences, on average, between people of different races, which could be attributed solely to genetics. He reach generic conclusions along the lines of “Asians are more intelligent than Caucasians and Africans, Africans are more athletic than Asians and Caucasians, etc.” There was a huge uproar about it in newspapers across Canada. Pretty much nobody defended him or his line of research. I know I certainly didn’t.

Someone in the audience asked David Suzuki what he thought of this controversy. He said (much more eloquently that I’m about to say) that when embarking on a line of scientific research, one must first ask oneself, why? Why do this? What possible benefit could come from this research? And if there’s any benefit at all, is it really worth it when compared to the huge harm that it could cause? In this particular case, the huge harm would be the results of this study being used to reinforce racial sterotypes, which would have such a detrimental effect on individuals and society as a whole.

This seems like a very similar issue. Ethics in science is a very slippery slope. Scientists can often get hung up on the purity of doing research for its own sake, finding the truths in the universe simply because they’re there. But the fact is, if an area of research has almost nothing to gain and everything to lose, then any scientist determined to embark upon it should seriously analyze their motivations to be certain that they’re not trying to prove own their predisposed convictions rather than trying to find truth for its own sake.

I honestly can’t see what benefit there will be in proving that there is or isn’t a genetic cause for homosexuality. I suppose that if a genetic link were found, some religious people might finally relent from their conviction that homosexuality is a sin. But I doubt it. What would probably happen is that in the decades to come, homosexuality would be treated more and more as an abnormality, which every would-be parent would want to genetically screen their offspring for.

I think there are just so many more important and useful avenues of research out there. In the search for the “gay gene”, I think the pros are definitely outweighed by the cons.