The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [70]
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 originating 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 instruments into 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