The Man Who Ate Everything (19 page)

I regret to report that I found very little lordosis in Salt Lake City. I did meet with a group of interesting scientists, learned of some major discoveries in the science of smell, wore two perfumes that may or may not revolutionize the fragrance business, and ate several bags of gourmet saltwater taffy, made with salt from the Great Salt Lake.

A pheromone is a chemical messenger sent by one member of a species to another that is capable of changing the behavior or internal state of the receiver. The most famous pheromones are sexual, like the signals emitted by female moths and butterflies to attract males from as far away as several miles. This talent of the female silkworm moth was discovered in the nineteenth century and attributed at first to some sort of radiation. Finally, in 1959, her signal was identified as the chemical bombykol, emitted by the female and smelled, or at least sensed, by tiny hairs on the male moth’s antennae. This was the first pheromonal puzzle ever solved by human science. In celebration, the word “pheromone” was coined, a compound of the Greek
pherein
(to carry) and the Greco-English
hormone
(to excite). It can hardly have been a coincidence that, in the very same year, these now-classic verses soared to the top of the pop charts:

I told her that I was a flop with chicks. I’ve been that way since Nineteen Fifty Six. She looked at my palm and she made a magic sign. She said, “What you need is Love Potion No. 9.”

I didn’t know if it was day or night.

I started kissin’ everything in sight.

But when I kissed the cop down at Thirty Fourth and
Vine

He broke my little bottle of Love Potion No. 9.

Sexual pheromones may get the most attention, but the range of chemical signals in the animal kingdom is astonishing. In various species and under a variety of circumstances, pheromones can say, “Here’s the food,” “Let’s you and me fight,” “I’m pregnant,” “Let’s all infest this tree together,” “Let’s form a swarm,” “Our queen is here, so everything’s OK,” “Please follow this path,” and “Help us carry this terrific chunk of food.” Harvard’s E. O. Wilson estimates that the smooth running of an ant colony requires ten or more types of chemical messages. Honeybees use thirty pheromonal systems to guide, instruct, encourage, and assign jobs to nurses, soldiers, undertakers, and food gatherers.

The simpler mammals could not get along without pheromones. Most of them are inarticulate and cannot write or speak distinctly. And most of them are nocturnal and need their sense of smell to navigate in the darkness. Humans are the only mammals perpetually ready for sex; the others are willing and fertile so infrequently that they need all the help they can get to be in the right place at the right time. The entire sex life of the male golden hamster is micromanaged by chemical messages; pheromones lead him to the female, announce her reproductive status, reduce his potential for unromantic aggression, rapidly raise the level of his testosterone, and finally bring on his copulatory behavior. Male hamsters who have lost their sense of smell do not even get to first base. There appear to be no pheromones that compel the male hamster to engage in intimate conversation after copulation or send flowers the next day.

But I am not a hamster, nor was meant to be, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot. A human being is articulate; possesses consciousness, free will, lots of brainpower, and a keen pair of eyes and ears; and is nearly always capable of sex. Why do we need the help of chemical messages? Our behavior is rarely governed by the
mechanical simplicity of stimulus and response; we interpret and manipulate the messages of our senses.

Or do we? Apart from the current work of the Erox Corporation, the strongest evidence we have for human pheromones comes from women’s dormitories. Women living together in close quarters have long noticed that their menstrual periods soon begin to coincide. Dr. Martha K. McClintock, then at Harvard, carefully followed the cycles of 135 female undergraduates living in one large dormitory and found that menstrual synchrony occurred among roommates and close friends, though not among all 135 women. McClintock was able to eliminate most of the possible causes that might occur to you and me—similar patterns of stress, of exposure to light and darkness, of diet—and was left with only one: the more time any two women spent together, the more likely their menstrual cycles were to have harmonized. She also found that the more time a woman spent with men (measured in time, not sexual encounters), the shorter and more regular her cycle was likely to be.

At least in this regard, the human female college student is indistinguishable from the common female house mouse. A female mouse surrounded by other females will have a longer cycle; the presence of a male mouse shortens it. And the timing of a female’s puberty depends on whether she spends time with male mice (puberty now) or with females (puberty later). Scientists have discovered that these phenomena are provoked by chemical signals—pheromones—in the little creatures’ urine and are sensed by a special receptor, the vomeronasal organ, in their noses.

Are pheromones responsible for menstrual synchrony in humans? The answer is probably yes. And the usual suspect is the chemical androstenol, found both in the underarm sweat of humans and in a boar’s saliva, where it triggers the much-sought-after lordosis in the sow. But studies of whether androstenol acts as a pheromone in humans are inconclusive—which is not surprising, because pheromones from one species are not meant to
affect another. Nonetheless, androstenol is the key ingredient in two perfumes sold by the Jovan company with the claim that they have been “scientifically created to attract.”

Such was the state of my knowledge about pheromones as I flew over the Rockies and descended into Salt Lake City in search of lordosis. To be entirely truthful, I already knew that the Erox Corporation, while it claimed to have discovered a dozen human pheromones, discouraged the belief that it had found an irresistible and urgent sexual attractant. Instead, Erox’s pheromones are meant to increase the
wearer’s
sense of well-being, to elicit sensuality rather than sexuality.

Erox was founded as a perfume company by physician-entrepreneur David Berliner, and its purpose is to exploit the human pheromones he has discovered and thus claim its share of the ten-billion-dollar world fragrance market. This is an astounding number. Ten billion dollars a year comes to $ 1.84 a person for everyone on the face of the earth—more, really, because I rarely use perfume. Berliner has also founded Pherin, a sister company working on the basic science of pheromones and their therapeutic potential.

Thirty-five years ago, before the word “pheromone” had been coined, Berliner was doing research on the composition of the human skin, or at least so he tells every reporter who has asked. He obtained skin samples by scraping the inside surface of casts that had been worn by injured skiers, prepared a sludgy extract of this material, and stored the extract in laboratory flasks. He and his coworkers were amazed to notice that their moods became mellow and cooperative whenever the flasks were left open, in sharp contrast to the fractious atmosphere that usually prevailed. Then Berliner moved on to other things and froze his sludge for thirty years. It occurred to him once or twice that he may have discovered a human pheromone, but it was not until 1989 that he turned for advice to a former colleague at the University of Utah School of Medicine—Dr. Larry Stensaas, an anatomist who has worked for the past decade mapping the brain.

I drove to the medical school, where Stensaas was ready for me with a slide lecture. He demonstrated that many reptiles and mammals possess at least two separate sensory systems originat-j ing in the nose. One, the olfactory system, has nerve endings high up in the nasal cavity and is responsible for the sense of smell; it sends signals about food and wine and fragrances to the cortex of the brain, where they are examined, interpreted, and consciously considered. A second system senses pheromones through the vomeronasal organ, or VNO (which we have already met in the house mouse). In the lower animals, the VNO sends messages along special nerves not only to the cortex but directly to the hypothalamus, where the emotions and reproduction are regulated. A reptile flicks out her tongue to retrieve chemical information about her environment, then carries it back to her VNO. We can just sniff it in.

Until the team at Erox stirred up interest in the issue, most experts doubted the existence of human pheromones because our nervous systems appeared to lack both a VNO and the requisite wiring back to the brain. But Stensaas and his colleagues discovered that
all of us
possess a VNO, a potential pheromone receptor, and that our VNOs are located just where they should be—inside each nostril, on the septum, which separates the nostrils, about a half inch back from the tip of the nose. According to Stensaas, the human VNO turns out to be one of the largest in the animal kingdom, larger than that of a horse. He showed me one hundred striking electron-microscope slides of the human VNO and the nerves that may possibly carry impulses from it to the brain (this part has yet to be proved). And then, I believe, I saw one with my very own eyes.

We drove to Erox’s small laboratory at a nearby research park. There I watched Luis Monti-Bloch, M.D., a neurophysiologist, carry out his most persuasive experiment. A student named Brad lay flat on a cushioned laboratory table; he has served as a subject many times before and possesses a rare degree of discipline that allows him to lie still while people poke instrumentsinto his nose for hours at a time. First, I took a look at Brad’s septum through a pair of Zeiss loupelike jeweler’s magnifiers—and there it was, a little crimson cavity in Brad’s equally crimson septum, with an opening about a millimeter wide, a genuine vomeronasal organ if I’ve ever seen one. Later Monti-Bloch peered into my nose and reported that my own VNOs were where they should be and in seemingly healthy condition.

Monti-Bloch has invented a device that delivers any chemical you choose to the VNO in a precisely aimed and precisely timed manner. It is a narrow white plastic tube with another tube running down its center and a thin silver wire inside that, all connected to pumps and instruments at one end and open at the other. When Monti-Bloch presses a button, a pump sends the probable pheromone or a placebo down the inner tube; immediately, a reverse vacuum pump whisks it away through the outer tube after it has been in contact with the subject’s septum for only a half second—before the whiff can disperse into the nasal cavity and trigger the olfactory system. The silver wire reports back any electrical impulses that have been stimulated in the VNO. Berliner’s team has extracted twelve active compounds from his frozen pheromone skin sludge and, by watching the signal picked up by Monti-Bloch’s silver wire, has identified two of them as the most potent, ER-670 for women and ER-830 for men. These are the pheromones that will be used in Erox’s two perfumes.

I watched Monti-Bloch place the open end of his tube over Brad’s VNO and deliver fleeting puffs of either ER-830, a strong-smelling clove oil, or a completely neutral substance. A computer screen showed how Brad’s VNO responded. When the clove oil or the neutral substance was sent down the tube, there was no reaction, just a flat black line on the screen. But when ER-830 was pumped through, the flat line jumped to attention, forming the sort of graph—a sharp rise followed by a slower, more angular decay—that is, I was told, the characteristic response of sensory cells in other parts of the body.

Later I telephoned around to several major researchers in
animal pheromones and neuroanatomy. Even the most skeptical are enormously excited by the work done at Erox. But nobody can replicate the Erox experiments, because Berliner and his team will not reveal the chemical structure of their putative pheromones. And the question remains whether Brad’s VNO or yours or mine is connected to our brains, especially to the seat of sex and emotion in the hypothalamus. (Monti-Bloch’s silver wire had picked up impulses only from the VNO itself.) Berliner responded that to demonstrate conclusively a connection would take years of work. And why bother? he asked. The effect of ER-670 and ER-830 on mood and emotion is obvious to him. But this remains the crucial issue.

When we were finished torturing Brad, I was taken down the hall to Dr. Clive Jennings-White’s lab and tantalizingly shown the pure pheromones themselves. He is the chemist on the team and has synthesized the pheromones found in Berliner’s natural skin-extract sludge. All of his efforts are contained in two large brown glass jars, one for ER-670 and one for ER-830, each about a foot high and eight inches across and
nearly filled with a white crys
talline powder. Each contains enough pheromone to stimulate half a quadrillion people.

I asked to smell them, but Jennings-White told me that this would be against all the rules. I formulated a plan to trip the fire alarm and trick him into leaving the room while I pried the jars open, inserted my nose, and breathed deeply—but I decided against it. While nobody on the team would admit to having sniffed the pheromones directly, I cannot imagine that four such curious scientists could possibly have resisted the temptation for more than fifteen seconds. I gathered, though, that the Erox pheromones have absolutely no odor. Their only effect is on the vomeronasal organs in the septum of the nose and, from there, on the hypothalamus of the brain—unconscious, insidious, and subversive—if there is any effect on the brain at all.

I have little doubt that Berliner and Erox were once in search of the overpowering sexual attractant we dreamed of in high school. The vast majority of perfumes for women contain real or synthetic versions of pheromonal secretions from the Himalayan musk deer and the African or Asian civet cat. But in a medical journal published in 1991, Berliner and Jennings-White point out that this is illogical: pheromones operate only among members of the same species. Human pheromones would be “more natural and more effective as true attractants.” “The human behavior expected from pheromone stimulation is an enhancement of libido.” “The effect of pheromones would be … profound and irresistible.”