Chandler Burr states in the Dec. 16 issue that conservatives are "unaware of the clinical research -- all but universally accepted among biologists -- showing that homosexuality is a biological trait." Contrary to what he asserts, there is no universal acceptance of this notion because most biologists have no vested interest in ideology and so can understand the complexities of the issue.
Burr dismisses or disregards the criticisms of Dean Hamer's "discovery" of the gay gene. Consider, for instance, the findings of George C. Ebers, a professor of neurology at the University of Western Ontario, whose group has failed to replicate Hamer's findings. "We've been collecting families that have more than one gay person for five years," Ebers says, "and we've gone through something like four hundred pedigrees. In those [families] there is really no support for the idea that male homosexuality is X-linked [linked to the female sex chromosome]. The DNA tests that were done didn't even support [Hamer's] idea a bit. There wasn't even a trend toward increased sharing of haplotypes down there at Xq28" [the gay gene].
Hamer's research has also been called into doubt by articles in the journals Science and the The Scientist, which reported "not only . . . arguments over his interpretations of the data, but also .. allegations of misconduct."
If Burr had been better informed or less ideologically committed, he might have informed his 38-year-old correspondent that he was misinformed about psychotherapy and that rather than only a slim chance of being helped, he had one chance in four of converting to heterosexuality. In a recent report of the treatment of 814 male homosexuals who were conflicted about their sexual orientation, 80 percent of the patients improved clinically and about 24 percent actually changed their sexual orientation. This is consistent with a large systematic study done in 1962 in which 27 percent of the patients were able to change from homosexuality to heterosexuality.
Such results might be improved if it were possible to discover what factors are associated with mutability. But for political reasons, research of that nature is virtually impossible today. Both of these reports are methodologically imperfect, but they are powerful enough to raise serious doubts about the immutability of homosexuality
Contrary to what Burr believes and implies -- that homosexuality is merely a matter of sexual orientation -- homosexuality is a set of extremely varied behaviors ranging from pedophilia to transvestitism. Both clinicians and geneticists agree that the cause of this complex and varied behavior is both polygenic and multifactorial -- a fancier way of saying both nature and nurture.
YALE KRAMER, NEW YORK, NY