Love is a chemical reaction, say scientists
Nov 13, 2009
TO poets, love might be a many-splendoured thing. But in neuroscientist Larry Young’s lab, love is biochemistry. Young, a researcher in Atlanta, studies the neurobiology that underlies pair bonds - what non-scientists might call love.
TO poets, love might be a many-splendoured thing. But in neuroscientist Larry Young’s lab, love is biochemistry. Young, a researcher in Atlanta, studies the neurobiology that underlies pair bonds - what non-scientists might call love.
In an essay in the journal Nature last month, he laid out evidence that scientists may soon be able to tie the emotion ‘love’ to a biochemical chain of events and might someday even be able to develop drugs that enhance social bonding -- in much the same way that pharmaceuticals today can help regulate emotions like anxiety and depression.
In his lab at Yerkes, Young studies rodents called prairie voles. Unlike 95% of mammals, prairie voles mate for life. “They nest together, they raise a family together and they have this really intense bond between them,†he says.
In a series of studies, Young found that the hormones that produce that bond are the same ones that promote parent-child bonding in many other species. For females, that hormone is oxytocin. For males, the related hormone is called vasopressin. It promotes both pair bonding and fatherly behaviours like grooming young voles.
But like humans, some voles are more suited for monogamy than others. Young found that male voles with a particular variant of a gene, called AVPR1A, had fewer of those receptors than usual. And so, perhaps not surprisingly, voles with that gene variant were less likely to bond with females than voles without it.
In another study, Young found that implanting a version of the AVPR1A gene in meadow voles -- a related species that does not mate for life -- produced never-before-seen monogamous meadow voles. Recently, Swedish researcher Hasse Walum of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm found that a related gene in human males has similar effects.
Although Young does believe that scientists may someday develop bonding-enhancement drugs, he said that that day is still far in the future.
In an essay in the journal Nature last month, he laid out evidence that scientists may soon be able to tie the emotion ‘love’ to a biochemical chain of events and might someday even be able to develop drugs that enhance social bonding -- in much the same way that pharmaceuticals today can help regulate emotions like anxiety and depression.
In his lab at Yerkes, Young studies rodents called prairie voles. Unlike 95% of mammals, prairie voles mate for life. “They nest together, they raise a family together and they have this really intense bond between them,†he says.
In a series of studies, Young found that the hormones that produce that bond are the same ones that promote parent-child bonding in many other species. For females, that hormone is oxytocin. For males, the related hormone is called vasopressin. It promotes both pair bonding and fatherly behaviours like grooming young voles.
But like humans, some voles are more suited for monogamy than others. Young found that male voles with a particular variant of a gene, called AVPR1A, had fewer of those receptors than usual. And so, perhaps not surprisingly, voles with that gene variant were less likely to bond with females than voles without it.
In another study, Young found that implanting a version of the AVPR1A gene in meadow voles -- a related species that does not mate for life -- produced never-before-seen monogamous meadow voles. Recently, Swedish researcher Hasse Walum of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm found that a related gene in human males has similar effects.
Although Young does believe that scientists may someday develop bonding-enhancement drugs, he said that that day is still far in the future.