The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [71]
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 crystalline powder. Each contains enough pheromone to stimulate half a quadrillion people.
The Ice Between Courses
A few years ago, the coup de milieu was introduced to Paris, having been popular for a considerable time in Bordeaux and other maritime towns.… A young blond girl, aged between 15 and 19, wearing no ornament on her head and with her arms bare to above the elbow, serves each guest. She … should be a virgin if possible (though 19-year-old virgins are extremely rare in Paris).
—Grimod de La Reynière, c. 1804
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