You can't make someone love
you, even on Valentine's Day, no matter what Hallmark,
Godiva and FTD may say. But how much do we really
know about how love works? What is it that attracts
a particular man to a particular woman and (with
any luck) vice versa? To see what light science
could shed on the subject, I called Professor
Martha McClintock at the University of Chicago.
McClintock is an expert on odor and behavior who
published a famous study in the early 1970s that
showed that the menstrual cycles of college women
living in dorms became synchronized through exposure
to one another's pheromones, those faint chemical
signals released from the skin that control the
mating rituals of much of the animal kingdom.
McClintock has a new study, published in the February
issue of Nature Genetics, that makes an even more
provocative link between sex and odor--specifically,
the odor of a T shirt worn by a man on two consecutive
days.
The experiment was simple. The T shirts were carefully
prepared (no cologne, no cigarettes, no sex) and
then placed in boxes where they could be smelled
but not seen. Forty-nine unmarried women were
asked to sniff the boxes and choose which box
they would prefer "if they had to smell it all
the time."
The results would have made Sigmund Freud proud.
The women were attracted to the smell of a man
who was genetically similar--but not too similar--to
their dads. McClintock thinks there's an evolutionary
explanation. "Mating with someone too similar
might lead to inbreeding," she says. Mating with
someone too different "leads to the loss of desirable
gene combinations."
McClintock isn't suggesting you can attract a
mate by smell alone, but that hasn't discouraged
companies like Erox from bottling pheromones and
stopping just short of calling them aphrodisiacs.
Marketing websites feature links to scientific
papers on the power of pheromones. I spoke to
Dr. David Berliner, CEO of Pherin Pharmaceuticals,
who did some of the initial research. While working
at the University of Utah with natural compounds
produced by human skin, he noticed a surprising
change in the behavior of his male and female
colleagues. "They developed an increased level
of camaraderie that was hard to explain," he says.
There were smiles, eye contact and increased approachability
until the skin extracts were removed, at which
point the group reverted to normal behavior.
But even Berliner balks at categorizing pheromones
as aphrodisiacs. "I've been looking for an aphrodisiac
for 11 years, and I'm convinced that there is
no such thing," he says. The Food and Drug Administration
agrees. It surveyed purported love potions--from
oysters to rhino horn--and determined that none
of them work. This Valentine's Day, I think I'll
stick with flowers, a card and some chocolate.
Dr. Gupta is a neurosurgeon and CNN medical
correspondent
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