Still, he’s worried about the potentially ominous implications of his work - so much so, in fact, that he has decided to leave the field. Ngun, who is gay, agrees that this research is in its infancy, and says he has no intention of making a commercial test to predict sexuality. Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, told BuzzFeed News by email. “All predictive models need replication with larger samples, and this one certainly does,” J. Several experts who were not involved in the research told BuzzFeed News that they were skeptical of the veracity of these results, particularly because the study was based on a relatively small sample of men. These controversial results, which have not yet been published in a scientific journal, will be presented Thursday afternoon at a genetics conference in Baltimore.īy analyzing five “epigenetic” tags - chemicals that latch onto DNA and help turn genes on or off - the algorithm can reportedly predict a man’s sexual orientation with 67% accuracy, according to Tuck Ngun, who led the work as a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA. Researchers have developed an algorithm that they say can crudely predict homosexuality in men based on certain chemical tags in their DNA.
