Out of the Closet: ‘Gay Sheep’ Experiments Exposed

Update

Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) and Oregon State University (OSU) have received thousands of letters and e-mails protesting their unethical hormone-altering experiments on “gay sheep.” In response to this public outcry, the universities are now scrambling to come up with excuses to justify the experiments, but they don’t have a leg to stand on. Please read our detailed letter to OSU, which refutes all the school's allegations.

Click here to read PETA’s open letter in response to OSU and OHSU’s ‘gay sheep’ experiments.

In addition to being blacklisted as one of PETA’s picks for the 10 worst laboratories for conducting crude and useless experiments on monkeys, Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) is now facing public condemnation from animal rights and gay rights advocates and scientific experts for its ill-conceived “gay sheep” experiments.

At the heart of these multimillion-dollar experiments, which are funded by taxpayers through the year 2008, is the goal of hormonally manipulating sheep’s sexual-partner preferences to be heterosexual. These experiments also carry the insidious implication that homosexuality in humans needs to be “cured.” OHSU experimenter Charles Roselli is killing scores of sheep and cutting open the brains of rams he calls “male-oriented” (homosexual) in an attempt to find the hormonal mechanisms behind homosexual tendencies, so that they can subsequently be changed.

Roselli is also working with experimenter Frederick Stormshak of Oregon State University (OSU), who has surgically installed an estrogen implant in the bodies of rams in an effort “to restore tissue levels of estrogen comparable to those of heterosexual rams and affect sexual behavior accordingly.”

In a March 5, 2004, news release issued by OHSU, the university admitted that Roselli and Stormshak would “like to know whether sexual preferences can be altered by manipulating the prenatal hormone environment, for instance by using drugs to prevent the actions of androgen in the fetal sheep brain.”

Equally disturbing is the experimenters’ stated intention to apply their findings in sheep to humans. This is highlighted in Roselli’s application for public funding from the National Institutes of Health: “The [sheep] experiments proposed in this application will furnish important information that is needed to formulate and test novel hypotheses about the biological basis of sexual orientation in higher mammals including humans.” Roselli goes on to note in one of his published journal articles that “this research also has broader implications for understanding the development and control of sexual motivation and mate selection across mammalian species, including humans.”

This is not only a needless slaughter of animals and an ethically indefensible experiment; it has also been condemned by experts on scientific grounds. Dr. Malgosia Cegielski, a Portland-based clinical psychologist, calls Roselli’s gay-sheep experiment “frivolous” and “frightening.” She says: “I don’t see any clinical utility or human benefit with what he’s doing. … The gene expression and biological differences at a cellular level between [nonhuman] animals and humans is so huge. To draw conclusions between animal behavior [and] humans is a joke.”

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