The Wake

Five years ago Charles Roselli began a study with a team of researchers and a small flock of sheep to determine why about 8 percent of rams seem to be gay. In the past year, he’s been criticized from both ends of the political spectrum and accused that his studies are unethical and ba-a-a-d science.

While most major news outlets left the story alone, some had a field day, poking fun at the idea of the experiment with headlines like “Ewe Turn for Gay Rams on Hormones” and “He’s Just Not That Into Ewe.” Roselli is a professor of physiology and pharmacology at Oregon Health and Science University and is working in conjunction with Oregon State University. OHSU, which has been criticized in the past for experimenting on monkeys, received about 20,000 letters protesting the experiment. This may have been the result of a PETA campaign — one chockfull of lies. Some religious conservatives, including right-wing group Focus on the Family, which strongly advocates that homosexuality is a choice, was also outraged. Strangely, most of the commotion, not to mention libel, came from the left-wing.

But PETA wasn’t the only one who got the facts wrong. Controversy elevated as the media and bloggers got word of the experiment. On New Year’s Eve, the London Times ran a story called “Experiments that claim to ‘cure’ homosexual rams spark anger.”

Jim Newman, a press officer at the university told ABC News, “This is not true. This has never been suggested, and in fact the researchers have proactively explained for years that this is a basic science study aimed at gaining understanding of the biology of sexual attraction.”

Shalin Gala of PETA wrote in an open letter response to the study that Roselli’s work is “troubling.” She inaccurately accuses Roselli of spending millions of taxpayer’s dollars “to kill homosexual rams and cut open their brains in an attempt to find the hormone behind homosexual tendencies so that these tendencies can be changed.” She went on to say these experiments carry the insidious implication that homosexuality in humans can be ‘cured.’ ”

The first part she got right — that the experiment is costing millions of dollars, about 2.8 actually. But she severely distorts the facts when she says that Roselli and his team of researchers intend to “cure” homosexuality. In fact they never said anything about finding a cure. They never said or implied that it is a condition that needs curing as if it were a disease.

Along with other bloggers, writer for Time Magazine’s website, Andrew Sullivan, jumped on board to set the record straight, as did anonymous blogger, “emptypockets.”

“Emptypockets” who reveals only that he is a biologist who does not study vertebrates anymore, says in a blog that “you would have to be appallingly incurious about the world around you not to think it is fascinating to understand how biology drives sexual behavior in other animals and perhaps influences humans.” He also explains that if it’s the killing of animals that PETA is worried about, which is necessary to dissect their brains after behavioral observations, then they are targeting the wrong people. Roselli says that on average he kills eighteen sheep a year for the experiments. By contrast, “Emptypockets” says that meat-packing companies kill almost 4 million sheep each year.

It is stated in the study that the “research was conducted in accordance with the principles and procedures outlined by the National Institutes of Health’s Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals” and was approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees of Oregon Health and Science University and Oregon State University.

But some of the methods do seem a bit cruel and very unusual. According to the study, a series of sexual behavior and partner performance tests were conducted. The latter tests, in brief, consisted of numerous thirty-minute trials of isolation of a set number of ewes with rams during which “courtship behaviors, mounts, and ejaculations were recorded.”

In the partner preference tests, the rams were “given the opportunity to mate with two estrous ewes and two randomly selected males that were restrained simultaneously in stanchions,” which Gala asserts is “essentially a ‘rape rack.’ ” That’s pretty extreme, Gala.

But the really peculiar part comes next. The rams that appear to be male-oriented in the previous tests were subjected to much longer trials — overnight tests that lasted 16 to 20 hours. After the tests were completed, rams of mixed sexual preference were housed together and were not permitted physical contact with females.

I’m not a scientist. I can’t explain exactly why the tests were done in this way, but while I believe some if it is perfectly fine for the sake of research, parts of it just seem a little odd.

The motives also do seem a bit fishy as well, not on Roselli’s part, but the government’s. There’s always the possibility that the government approved the grant for economic reasons. Farmers had apparently been pushing for research of this kind so they could possibly understand better why some of the studs they just bought won’t mate with their ewes.

PETA also accuses the researchers of wording the grant proposal to NIH to make it seem relevant to humans, though it may not be. Good luck getting such a grant from NIH without doing so, but there’s a very good possibility that it really will be useful for brain research.

Some may also argue that we run into similar ethical concerns as those with the Human Genome Project. In short, that with enough knowledge of how these things work, the “undesirables” could be eliminated or fixed. But the genome has been mapped for over a half a decade, and it’s been furthering research more than it could ever harm society. This isn’t much different.

As Roselli said in a response to emptypockets, “Like all basic research there are potential benefits from this research at several levels. Sexual behavior is in many ways a hard-wired behavior, especially in animals like sheep.” He says that these findings can give us a better understanding of how the brain works and “may give us insights into other sexually differentiated behaviors and neuroendocrine functions.”

“You can make cells do a lot of things in a dish,” says emptypockets in his blog. “What matters is what they do in real life, in real animals. Unfortunately, stopping animal research means stopping biology flat.”

In an email to emptypockets, Roselli said of the London Times article, “what is so frustrating is that articles like this pit the scientist against the activist and then pretend to present a “balanced” account. They don’t understand the science and perpetrate a lot of misinformation and outright lies.”

If it’s a better understanding of the brain and the implications it has on our social behaviors that they’re after, fine. Though this might not be the motive of everybody supporting it, it still does not give PETA, other activists and the media the right to spread lies. That is never acceptable.