Detecting and Teaching Desire: Phallometry, Freund, and Behaviorist Sexology.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Kurt Freund and other researchers developed phallometry to demonstrate the effectiveness of behaviorism in the diagnosis and treatment of male homosexuality and pedophilia. Researchers used phallometers to segment different aspects of male arousal, to discern cryptic hierarchies of eroticism, and to monitor the effectiveness of treatments to change an individual's sexuality. Phallometry ended up challenging the expectations of behaviorist researchers by demonstrating that most men could not change their sexual preferences--no matter how hard they tried or how hard others tried to change them.

Hurdling over sex? Sport, science, and equity.

Between 1968 and 1999, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) required all female athletes to undergo genetic testing as part of its sex verification policy, under the assumption that it needed to prevent men from impersonating women and competing in female-only events. After critics convinced officials that genetic testing was scientifically and ethically flawed for this purpose, the IOC replaced the policy in 1999 with a system allowing for medical evaluations of an athlete's sex only in cases of "reasonable suspicion," but this system also created injustice for athletes and stoked international controversies. In 2011, the IOC adopted a new policy on female hyperandrogenism, which established an upper hormonal limit for athletes eligible to compete in women's sporting events.

The riddle of sex: biological theories of sexual difference in the early twentieth-century.

At the turn of the twentieth century, biologists such as Oscar Riddle, Thomas Hunt Morgan, Frank Lillie, and Richard Goldschmidt all puzzled over the question of sexual difference, the distinction between male and female. They all offered competing explanations for the biological cause of this difference, and engaged in a fierce debate over the primacy of their respective theories. Riddle propounded a metabolic theory of sex dating from the late-nineteenth century suggesting that metabolism lay at the heart of sexual difference.

Chlorpromazine affects permeability of resting cells of Tetrahymena pyriformis.

Incubation of cell suspensions of Tetrahymena pyriformis with chlorpromazine increased the permeability of the cell membrane. This permeability change could be measured either biochemically by the increased entrance of a chelator or physically by change in light scattering.