the old joke about how to stop fish from smelling (cut off their noses, course) may be taking on new dimensions of meaning and import.  dr. charles wysocki of the monell chemical senses centre in philadelphia believes he has found more evidence that human sexual orientation is genetically determined.  dr wisocki has published in the journal Psychological Science results of scientific tests he performed while investigating the importance of body odor as a sexual attractant. 

the experiments required a group of 24 hetrosexual males, females, gay males and gay females who were washed clean of all unnatural scent and fed restricted diets for 9 day.  afterwards, well...yall wont believe me anyway so i'm gonna quote my source here Link

After this, they wore sterile cotton pads under their armpits for a day. These were collected and stored to use as a bottled source of their body odour. A panel of 82 heterosexual and homosexual men and women, not including the donors of the armpit pads, were asked to sniff each bottled body odour and evaluate its pleasantness according to a set of criteria.

and you thought science was all fun and games.

according to dr wisocki:

"Heterosexual males and females preferred odours from heterosexual males relative to gay males; gay males preferred odours from other gay males.

"Heterosexual males and females and lesbians over the age of 25 preferred odours from lesbians, relative to the odours from gay males; gay males preferred the odours of other gay males relative to lesbians

The overall conclusions are that the body odour you most prefer or least prefer does not depend on where it comes from but it also depends on who you are, in other words, your sexual orientation."

before you turn up your nose or snort in derision, you need to know the following:

Other studies showed that body odour is linked with a set of genes involved in controlling the immune system - called the major histocompatability complex - and heterosexual men and women preferred the odour of those with a different set of these genes to their own. One theory is that this could be an evolutionary mechanism to avoid inbreeding. The latest study suggests the genes involved in body odour may also play a role in sexual orientation.

or as the good doctor summarizes:

"The bigger picture is that body odour is determined in part by gender orientation which is not something we can have predicted. And it's possible that the genes involved in body odour are also involved in later life in gender orientation."

so.  if you're gay and don't wanna be...or maybe you're just worried bout those feelings you have in lockerooms...i guess there's now a potential "cure".  of course people are gonna be wondering what happened to your nose.