Andrea Burri, MSc of King's College, London, is currently offering to shave her hair, run naked across Westminster Bridge or almost anything else, in order to get donations towards a study into possible connections between genetics and female homosexuality - these desperate measures are a direct result of the difficulties in getting funding from official bodies.  A good looking, queer, Swiss academic, the naked sprint is not an unappealing prospect - one imagines British lesbians forming mobs to donate and spectate.  At this stage, they only have ethical approval to collect samples from volunteers within the UK, although they are very keen to find collaborators and expand into other countries.

Apparently in genetics studies, a homogenous sample is absolutely crucial, due to the differences in the genetic make-up of different races.  Initially, the study will focus on caucasians, for purely practical reasons,  "It's only because of one practical reason: money. To do genetic studies you need to "genotype" the volunteers, which means you draw a kind of a map or a profile of their genes, in order to be able to compare them with each other. Now this is very very cost intensive. Our department has a twin registry of around 10000 twin volunteers out of which around 4000 have already had their "genotyping" (and their all caucasians) therefore it is much cheaper to use these twins who do not consider themselves as being gay as a control group, but to do that you need to compare them to women who consider themselves bisexual or homosexual which are comparable, therefore they need to be caucasian."

Individual volunteers will not have access to their specific results, simply because mapping one person's genome will not produce any information about that person - while as part of a much larger group of people and their genomes, DNA can be compared and results assessed.  The study is also a completely anonymous one, with regards to volunteers and under the auspices of the Ethics Committee, once volunteers have sent in their samples, all of their personal information and contact details are deleted, leaving the sample identified only by an untraceable identification number.

According to Andrea Burri, there has been extensive research into links between genes and male homosexuality, but, "There have been a few very small studies (only about 100-200 sample size) in women. However these studies were really small and had a lot of methodological issues and therefore there results are not really reliable and valid."  There are rumours of a department in the USA intending to conduct a similar study, but the work has not yet begun and so this one's the only one of its size and scope so far worldwide.  On the importance of getting this research off the ground, Andrea says, "Whereas male homosexuality is a well investigated field and a lot of hypotheses and theories have been written, almost nothing is known about female homosexuality when it comes to physiological, biological correlates."

With a pretty comprehensive absence of existing research and results, Andrea says, "We are looking at any random genes that could influence sexual orientation in women. Of course we will have candidates (genes that have been shown to be involved in male homosexuality, sexual orientation etc - if there are any) to start with but basically knowledge is so limited that we would start from 0, and search in a "blind" fashion for what could underly sexual orientation.  We are not interested, or let's say expecting, to find THE gene that makes women gay. It is rather an attempt to explore the genetic basis of sexual orientation in general and many thousands of genes could be involved."

So why has there been research into male homosexuality and the genetic connection and not into the female aspect?  Andrea's theories are both complex and interesting, "First of all, because it seems that there are less taboos in the male gay world compared to female gays and this seems to be true also for research. It looks like gay men are "less" scared to take that step and explore and therefore take more initative to do so.   Secondly, based on research findings so far it seems that female homosexuality is somehow more complex and therefore harder to "assess" given that for example there are many women who consider themselves heterosexual but still have bisexual tendencies. Then again, many women "come out" at a later age, which seems to occur less in gay men ... it seems like there is a bigger heterogeneity in women when it comes to sexual orientation ... and this of course is harder to study." 

As for her own personal interest in the field, "Ah you know when you got ten research papers lying in front of you and you always go for the sex stuff instead of things like depression or phobias then somehow the decision is already made!"

Wanna get involved?