fellowship in Hamer's lab; who dismissed her could not be determined. Later, she was given another position in a different lab. Hamer stated that Crewdson's article was "seriously in error" and denied the allegations made against him. An official inquiry launched by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) to investigate the allegations of selective presentation of the data ended in December 1996. It determined that Hamer had not committed any scientific misconduct in his study. Subsequent studies Two further studies in the 1990s gave mixed results. One was an X chromosome linkage analysis of 54 pairs of gay brothers carried out by the independent research group of Sanders et al. in 1998. The results of the study were indistinguishable from the results of the study by Hu et al.: both reported that the chromosomal location of maximum sharing was locus DXS1108 and both reported similar degrees of allele sharing (66% versus 67%). The second study by Rice et al. in 1999 studied 52 pairs of Canadian gay brothers and found no statistically significant linkage in alleles and haplotypes. Consequently, they concluded against the possibility of any gene in the Xq28 region having a large genetic influence on male sexual orientation (though they could not rule out the possibility of a gene in this region having a small influence). Rice et al. also asserted that their results do not exclude the possibility of finding male homosexuality genes elsewhere in the genome. Hamer criticized the study for not selecting families for their study population based on maternal transmission as selecting only families that show an excess of maternal gay relatives is necessary to detect the Xq28 linkage. A meta-analysis of all data available at that time (i.e., Hamer et al. (1993), Hu et al. (1995), Rice et al. (1999), and the unpublished 1998 study by Sanders et al. indicated that Xq28 has a significant but not exclusive role in male sexual orientation. The authors of the meta-analysis (which included three authors of the Rice et al. study, Rice, Risch and Ebers) presented several methodological reasons due to which Rice et al. (1999) may have been unable to detect statistically significant linkage between Xq28 and male sexual orientation: the families genotyped by Rice et al. were non-representative as they had an excess of paternal instead of maternal gay relatives thus obscuring the display of any X-chromosome linkage; the statistical power of their sample