Sentient by Jackie Higgins

Author:Jackie Higgins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan

‘I was the only woman, and the only undergraduate, in the room. I remember feeling deeply embarrassed and blushing as I raised my hand,’ recalled Martha McClintock. Now the founding director of the Institute for Mind and Body at the University of Chicago, in the summer of 1968 she was still a student at Wellesley College and attending a seminar packed with many eminent biologists. They were discussing mice and how the females use pheromones. Whereas female giant peacock moths use pheromones to effect a change in the male’s behaviour, female mice use them to change another female’s physiology and synchronize their reproductive cycles. McClintock lived in a dormitory of over one hundred women and, as the person designated to fetch feminine hygiene products, she had noticed a peculiar pattern. ‘Once a month people would start yelling “We’re out!” and I would get on my bike and ride down to the drugstore.’ At the seminar, she stood up and spoke out in front of a mainly male audience. ‘I made the point that women living together also had synchronized menstrual cycles. I can then remember all of these eyes staring at me,’ she recalled. ‘I got the impression that they thought it was ridiculous. But they had the courtesy to frame their scepticism as a scientific question: “What is your proof?” ’ And so began one of the most famous experiments in human olfaction.

Enlisting the help of dorm-mates, McClintock set about collecting evidence for her observation from across the following academic year. One hundred and thirty-five females were asked when their cycles started, how long they lasted, their room number and with whom they spent most time. McClintock discovered that at the start of a new term everyone’s cycles differed, but after four months they shifted to follow those with whom they had most contact. Her professor, the great sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, encouraged her to publish; when her paper was accepted by the illustrious British journal Nature, she was still only twenty-two. In it, she stated, ‘Although this is a preliminary study, the evidence for synchrony and suppression of the menstrual cycle is quite strong . . . Perhaps at least one female pheromone affects the timing of other female menstrual cycles.’ It took nearly three more decades to unravel the biochemistry behind her observations. In 1998, again in Nature, she reported the discovery of two odourless compounds from female underarm sweat that work in tandem on other women. The research revealed that when sweat produced before ovulation is applied to another woman’s upper lip, it acts to accelerate the recipient’s ovulation and shorten her cycle, whereas sweat produced at ovulation acts to delay another’s ovulation and lengthen her cycle. This chemical coupling enables a woman to effect a physiological change in another, exerting control over their fertility without their awareness. Consequently and to great fanfare, McClintock was able to claim that her study at last ‘provides definitive evidence of human pheromones’. Yet, like the androgen studies, the results

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