With the help of babies and more than 5,000 of their diapers, Emory University researchers have developed an accurate, noninvasive method to determine estrogen levels in infants.
The method, previously used in nonhuman primates, will allow researchers to learn more about the association between estrogen levels in human infants and their long-term reproductive development as well as the development of sex-specific behaviors, such as toy preference or cognitive differences. What’s more, the method will also allow researchers to look at how early disruption of the endocrine system affects long-term maturation, a growing concern among researchers and physicians.
Surprisingly little is known about hormone levels during human infancy. Previous human research has focused on the measurement of hormones in blood, urine and saliva. The new data are the result of using fecal samples collected from cotton diapers. With this novel approach, the researchers successfully measured the fecal levels of estradiol, a type of estrogen…
“The development of an assay to measure estrogen from diapers might initially strike one as unnecessary or strange, but the need is real,” says Sara Berga, MD…
“These observations are the first report of human infant fecal estradiol levels and they provide a new tool for investigating early human development”, says Michelle Lampl, PhD, MD. “Because infant diapers are plentiful, fecal samples can be collected frequently and over a long period of time. Future longitudinal studies will allow the association between fecal levels of steroids and physiological measures to be assessed, and expand our understanding independent of serum measures.”
And moms will love you for taking the samples away.
OK. They measure it. Then what? What can you do about it? What if the test indicate your little baby boy is going to be gay? In some countries, that could be used as an excuse to kill him.
oh shit
Oh FINALLY! A use for TSA checkers.
Next time you want to know, take your kid, complete with poop filled diaper, through the TSA scanning process.
I just reread the article.
If you can’t tell the sex of your infant from sheer visual inspection, you’ve got more problems than your kid, gay, straight, bi or transgendered.
And until s/he develops tendencies, you can’t tell in the latter two (three, 🙂 cases.
This is bogus. I know: “The Science Is In!”
Screw that.
#1 – Hormone therapy, obviously. You want to nip it in the bud before the kid even knows.
You may have noticed the words “gay” and “homosexual” were never used, in the article. But surely that was implied. Because the sex of infants are usual established by sonogram, months before delivery. And certainly, immediately after being born. So what they’re saying is this. By some chemical analysis of baby poop, they can tell if your new born will turn gay later in life. So use the test to try and put an end to that. I can foresee many a false positive, leading to traumatized parents, and badgered children in anti-gay camps. All in the name of some damn junk science. Exploiting people’s ignorance and fear. Not to mention way too much handling of baby poop, we all rather be rid of. Now they want us to test it, often, for gay-ism.
I suppose the test results could swing the other way, in the extreme. And your baby could be a potential Tiger Woods or Hugh Hefner. What then? Do you send it off to a boarding school, a monastery, or the Playboy (or Playgirl) Academy? Har.
Imagine the plight of the poor summer scholarship research intern having to scrape 5000 diaper payloads into test tubes, to see if little Johnny wears pink or blue?