Fortune Pheromone Article

A SIXTH SENSE THAT AFFECTS HOW YOU FEEL

Article from Fortune Magazine

By Gene Bylinsky

Scientists have learned to stimulate a system of receptors that turn emotions on and off. The possibilities are scary-and fascinating. An imaginative University of Utah anatomist named David L. Berliner was working with substances that occur in human skin. When he left some of the extracts in open vials around the lab, he noticed a sudden, puzzling rise in camaraderie among a previously acrimonious group of researchers working with him. When he changed the extracts a few months later, the group resumed its contentious ways. Berliner froze and saved the extracts. 

Nearly 30 years later, by this time a Silicon Valley biotech millionaire, thanks to a method of containing drugs and cosmetics inside tiny, spongelike polymer spheres, he returned to the subject. In 1989 he set up Erox Corp., which has isolated the suspected good-fellowship pheromones-behavior-controlling substances similar to those already known to stimulate sexual activity in animals. (One whiff of a pheromone called aphrodisin from a female hamster and a male is ready to mate.) 

Then came another surprise: The pheromones were odorless and thus had no effect on the human olfactory system. What could be detecting them? That mystery led Berliner to rediscover a tiny bean of an organ in the human nose-an event that may prove explosive in influencing human behavior. The structure is called the vomeronasal organ, or VNO. (Vomer is Latin for plow; the organ sits within the mucous membrane that covers the plow-shaped septum, the cartilage that divides the nostrils.) In lower animals, the VNO serves as a receptor for sex pheromones. Although the VNO was identified in man more than a century ago, scientists assumed it had become a useless vestigial organ. Because the human VNO is small, and hidden except for a slit that leads inside, some concluded that it had atrophied.