The Greenville Independent, Sept. 7, 1994, page 15

Sex and insects

By Lois Carol Wheatley

Several of my friends were not at all surprised when I told them that the same recent scientific breakthrough that will make us irresistible to the male species will also rid our kitchens of cockroach infestations.

Well, maybe some of them might have hinted at such a connection, but I had assumed their observations were not based on empirical scientific data.

This latest discovery is of such a magnitude that it could eclipse the feeble advances made by the combined efforts of Dow Chemical and Yves St. Laurent. It could make current perfume and insecticide weaponry obsolete. It could put women in total charge of the remote control and allow us to reach fearlessly into the farthest, darkest corners of our kitchen pantries.

I’m talking about pheromones. If you haven’t heard about them or found a way to get them, you’re probably still limping along on a combination of $50-an-ounce French perfume and Raid, and seeing the usual limited results.

For many years the cosmetics industry has sent us into our bathrooms to wash away our natural secretions and douse ourselves liberally with deer musk and boar saliva. But give this a little extra thought some day, and this time try using some logic. If animal magnetism in a bottle really worked, barnyard and forest creatures would flock from miles around to follow us everywhere.

The great minds of our day have now come up with something of the people, by the people and for the people. Pheromones are odorless, colorless and subtle, carrying all sorts of important imperative commands along wafting, circling air currents. Experts say it takes at least 10 different pheromones to run an ant colony smoothly, and as many as 30 to operate a beehive. More than 100 moth pheromones have been identified, none of which are apparently intended to warn them away from the porch light.

Pheromones appeal not to the usual olfactory senses, but to a tiny gland in the nose whose existence until recently has been denied by medical science: the vomeronasal organ (VNO). Well, for years they thought it might exist in infants, and then maybe something happened to it, possibly during the first cold or runny nose. But recently researchers in Colorado looked up 100 noses, and they found a VNO in every last one.

This was no simple feat (and not a pretty sight either), since VNOs are very small and require a penlight, a dental mirror, three hands and a straight septum to find. It was not unlike miniature spelunking. An anatomist named David L. Berliner has been chasing down this pheronomenon (sorry) for 30 years. He started in Salt Lake City with a flask of skin cells scraped from the cast-off casts of wounded skiers. He thought that moods around the lab improved somewhat when he left the flasks uncovered and just lying around, and that everybody seemed to go back to their usually grumpy selves when he covered them back up.

Berliner stuck his skiing skin cells in the freezer for 30 or so years until these other inquiring minds got around to looking up noses, and then he pulled them out again. But let’s backtrack for a minute here.

Berliner operated on the idea that a skier’s euphoria from shushing down an alpine slope is somehow contained in the skin cells he scraped from the inside of a cast—that had been applied presumably in an emergency room and worn six to eight weeks. Even contraband drugs are out of one’s system in four weeks, for purposes of drug testing. Don’t ask me how I know that.

Anyway, Berliner and some of his buddies went to work blowing 30-year-old ski-cast molecules up people’s noses to study reactions of the VNO. They claim the little guys perked up considerably, even with a trillionth of an ounce. They also claim that volunteers’ pulses and breathing slowed when pheromone met VNO, and that brains began producing more alpha waves, typical of a more relaxed state.

This proves, he contends, that there is a live hookup between the VNO and the hypothalamus, which lives right next door and regulates appetite, anger, fear and—you guessed it—sex drive. Skin cells that are capable of wreaking havoc in the lives of man are sloughed off constantly, at the rate of roughly 400 million a day. If we could see them, it would look like we are perpetually walking around in a dense fog of flying skin cells, kind of like Pig Pen in the Peanuts cartoons.

In addition, we breathe more than a gallon of air a minute, and that’s just sitting around. Berliner has turned entrepreneur, synthesized pheromones from both sexes, mixed them with standard perfume ingredients, and bottled the results to produce Realm for Men and Realm for Women. These can be ordered by calling an 800 (send in five bucks and we’ll tell you what it is) or, alternatively, by just waiting a little while for these products to hit the shelves of a cosmetic counter near you. Right next to it will be Realm for Roaches, a soon-to-be-made giant step in the emerging effort to attract cockroaches.

This is a previously overlooked field of endeavor, since no one has ever actually tried roach calls, roach whistles or roach toys, any of which could be used to persuade whole armies of roaches that a great party is going on just next door.

“It’s the year of the bug,” my exterminator recently told me, as he conducted some sort of atomic testing under my kitchen sink. “Every seven years or so, we make a pile of money.”

“Funny,” I replied. “I don’t think that’s what it said on my placemat at the Chinese carryout.”

But I’ve heard this from other sources, that 1994 will be remembered for its bug proliferation. If such things are cyclical, I’m wondering, are there accurate predictions available as to when the opposite sex may be expected to swarm?

If you thought looking up noses was bad, consider that an entomologist at Rutgers University dismembered the abdominal segments of 10,000 female cockroaches. Then he removed a male’s antenna, held it between two electrodes, and connected the whole thing to an oscilloscope. (Remember, this was a trained professional. Do not try this yourself at home.)

An electric signal was generated when the antenna responded to a chemical compound—and boy, did that antenna go for those abdominal segments. If this doesn’t turn out to be a significant insect control method with which we could build a better roach trap, we might consider using it to develop alternative energy sources.

Unfortunately, science has only synthesized a pheromone compound that haunts the soul of the brownbanded cockroach, while it is apparently the German cockroach that is the scourge of society. Which means we’re still a long way from luring the right kind of cockroach into the clutches of a wicked fate. Next they’ll tell me this Realm stuff has so far only been successful in luring broke, chronically unemployed men.