Wall Street Journal Pheromone Article

Data Hints Humans Can Get Chemical Messages

Article from the Wall Street Journal

By Jerry E. Bishop, Staff Reporter

Researchers are expected to report the first evidence that a long-forgotten sixth sense in humans may offer a new pathway to the brain for treating a long list of emotional and mental disorders. The new study is bound to raise controversy because it claims that humans, like many animals, can receive odorless chemical messages, called pheromones, from each other, a sense that most scientists have assumed was lost to evolution long ago. 

In a set of experiments to be published soon, scientists with a small, closely held company called Pherin Corp. will report that when they exposed a tiny mysterious spot inside the nose to a synthetic pheromone, they changed the levels of certain hormones circulating In the blood stream. This, they say, provides strong evidence that the tiny spot is connected directly to the brain and that synthetic pheromones could be used as a new kind of ultrasafe medical therapy. The first synthetic pheromone that is likely to be tested in humans will be one designed to ease premenstrual syndrome, or PMS, says David L. Berliner, the former professor of anatomy who founded Pherin, which is based in Menlo Park, Calif. Other synthetic pheromones under development might someday be used to relieve anxiety, thwart impulse disorders like, kleptomania and overeating, damp aggression or control rapid heart beats, Dr. Berliner says. A report of the hormone-affecting experiments by Dr. Berliner and his colleagues has been reviewed and accepted by the Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology for publication in June. 

The experiments mark an unexpected turn; in the decades-long effort to determine whether humans, after millions of years of evolution, have retained the ability to send and receive chemical messages. It is unquestioned that most animals, from insects to hogs, communicate chemically. The messages can range from a warning of dagger to a staking of territory to a signal to the opposite sex of a readiness for breeding. These animal pheromones, such as musk from a deer, have been the major chemical ingredients of most perfumes used by humans. But it has been a matter of long and intense debate whether humans can still sense chemical messages that may be wafting from one person to another. The debate is now being brought to an abrupt head by Dr. Berliner's experiments. 

Dr. Berliner believes that human pheromones puff off the skin as vapors. Humans, he says, began to lose their awareness of the pheromones when they started wearing clothes and bathing. Dr. Berliner began studying human pheromones in the 1950s when he was a professor of anatomy at the University of Utah doing research on human skin. Dr. Berliner's wife and research colleague noticed that every time Dr. Berliner worked with certain skin extracts he seemed unusually calm. Before he could explore the mood-lifting effect of the extracts, however, Dr. Berliner had an unexpected financial windfall and he left the laboratory for a 30-year career as a venture capitalist. 

In 1989, well enough off to finance his own research, he returned to the labs and the flasks of skin extracts that he had put aside three decades earlier. Researchers had assumed for years that in mammals pheromones are detected by the sense of smell. But in 1978, Margaret A. Johns, a doctoral candidate at the Rutgers University Institute of Animal Behavior, reported that in the lower mammals a tiny pit in the nose was the pheromone-sensing organ. Physiologists and anatomists had known of the pit, called the vomeronasal organ or VNO, in animals for more than 150 years but had been baffled at its function. Three years later, a University of Colorado surgeon, Bruce W. Jafek, reported he had found the tiny VN0 pit in several humans, one on each side of the septum that separates the nostrils. Since then, other researchers have claimed they have looked up the noses of more than 1,500 humans and have consistently found the VN0 pits. Nevertheless, "it is still a major issue on whether the VN0 exists in humans," says Charles Wysocki, a sensory scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. He notes, for instance, that no one can find the VNO in Old World nonhuman primates that supposedly share primate cousins. "You would wonder why it should suddenly reappear in humans," he says. 

But, Dr. Berliner argues, evidence that humans have a functioning VNO came when his colleague, neurophysiologist Luis Monti-Bloch, attached wires to the putative VNOs of some volunteers and puffed tiny amounts of the skin extracts on the pits. The wires picked up electrical impulses indicating the chemicals had triggered nerves in the pits, but didn't produce any activity in the olfactory, or "smell" nerves, indicating the pits were unrelated to the sense of smell. Even more startling, the chemicals extracted from male skin activated only the VNOs of females while the extracts from female skin activated only the VNOs of the male volunteers. 

Further research found that the extracts from one sex promoted a feeling of well being in the other sex. As a result, Dr. Berliner formed Erox Corp., which produces the Realm line of male and female perfumes in which the odorless pheromones are mixed with conventional perfume odors. But Dr. Berliner says his main goal is turning pheromones into pharmaceuticals. 

To this end, the company's chemist, Clive Jennings-White, has made hundreds of synthetic variations of what Dr. Berliner believes are human pheromones. Dr. Berliner believes the experiments that will be described in June cement hopes that pheromones can be used as an entirely new kind of drug - and clinch any scientific argument that the human VNO is linked directly to the part of the brain known as the hypothalamus. This is the part of the brain that controls the production of hormones, regulates the appetite and thirst, controls anxiety, fear and aggression and sets sleeping-waking patterns, to mention a few of its roles, 

For the experiments, Dr. Berliner returned to Mexico City, his birthplace, and enlisted the aid of Vicente Diaz-Sanchez at the National Institute of Nutrition. Every 10 minutes they administered one-second puffs of a synthetic variation of a female pheromone to the putative VNOs of 20 male and 10 female volunteers and then measured their physiological reactions. 

What is exciting the researchers is that levels of two hormones in the blood stream dropped following puffs of the chemical to the VNOs. The two hormones, the so-called luteinizing hormone, or LH, and follicular-stimulating hormone, or FSH, are produced by the pituitary gland and are involved In reproduction. The pituitary gland, in turn, is controlled through the hypothalamus. As expected, the effect was seen only in the men; the hormonal levels in the women volunteers were unchanged. The experiment, however, fails to convince the Monell center's Dr. Wysocki. "It is interesting they are getting some effect from this compound, but the results aren't as dramatic as you would expect," he says. "The responses In animals that are known to have a VNO are much more dramatic" than those seen by the Pherin scientists, he explains. The question of whether these nasal pits seen in the humans are connected to the brain's hypothalamus remains open, he argues. But Dr. Berliner remains jubilant. He believes pheromones will be inherently safe since no drugs enter the blood stream. Moreover, there is an almost instant response by the nervous system to a puff of the chemicals, which would be of major benefit to sufferers of destructive impulses, he explains. A kleptomaniac, for instance, could quickly damp his impulse to steal by a quick puff of a vomeropherin to the nose.