What are scientists in this field of biology still trying to figure out?
What we still really don’t understand is how the events that occur early in males are kept off in the female. That has to happen in order for there to be this bifurcation between males and females. The other thing we don’t understand is if there are active processes for female development. We can understand that there needs to be a repression of the male program in females, but we don’t yet know if there are really active events that cause the female to develop. The issue of how do you define a male or a female came to a head with the issue of testing for sex in the Olympics. Can you talk about this? As I recollect, [the Olympic committee decided to] basically look for the presence of SRY. With the discovery of SRY, they could use that rather than other tests. The problem with that is there are intersex individuals who would have a perfectly normal SRY but be phenotypically female. And the question is should they be competing as women or as men because they have this SRY. I think that
