This is medicine? Although the pheromone-bearing perfume has, understandably, hogged the press reports, the more interesting research is being done by another company founded by David Berliner. Pherin Corp., of Menlo Park, Calif., is investigating medical uses of the 30 to 35 pheromones Berliner says the firm has identified. Most are synthetic compounds that are structurally related to natural human pheromones, Berliner adds.

Berliner is cagey about results for fear of tipping his hand to potential competitors, but says one compound is being tested at the University of Utah for premenstrual syndrome. He adds that pheromones -- which he calls vomeropherins -- could be used to treat a variety of hormonally-related conditions. For example, a pheromone that lowers testosterone levels could be tested against prostate cancer, which grows in response to the male hormone. Many prostate cancer patients are currently treated with surgery or conventional drugs to reduce levels of the hormone. Treating hormone related diseases Other prospects include birth control and other endocrine (defined) diseases. Berliner's published research (see "The Functionality of the Human Vomeronasal Organ... " in the bibliography) shows that pheromones altered blood levels and secretion rates of follicle stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone, two master reproductive hormones. The data "provide support for a functional connection between the VNO [vomeronasal organ] and the pituitary," Berliner argues. And since the pituitary is a master endocrine gland, such effects could cascade through the body. Furthermore, pheromones presented to the VNO seem to affect heart rate breathing rate, and electrical conductivity of the skin. Most of the effects were small, quick and reversible. However, Charles Wysocki, a VNO expert at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, argues that the evidence was not very compelling. "They looked at a good many comparisons, and found four with significant affects. If your standard of statistical significance is P < .05, then there's one chance in 20 that each one will produce a positive result due entirely to chance," he points out. "So two of the four significant values could be by chance alone."

Real advantages? Although other scientists say he's going beyond the evidence in his claims, Berliner maintains that pheromones have several key advantages compared to conventional drugs. First, he says, "They act immediately because they don't have to travel to the bloodstream. If you put them in the VNO, the message goes directly to the hypothalamus," a part of the brain that controls anger, body temperature and other factors. Such immediate results, Berliner says, could be useful for treating such hard-to-treat conditions as panic attacks. "When you're on an airplane and it goes through turbulence, and you feel immediate panic. You need something now... to take away your panic." (Berliner says when he gets nervous before a speech, "I take some of my own medicine." (Such a medicine would take advantage of another pheromone effect: increasing brain alpha-waves, a sure sign of relaxation.) Second, pheromones are effective in extremely tiny doses that, so far, seem safe. "We've given doses billions of times higher [than the effective dose] to lab animals, and there's absolutely no toxicity," Berliner says. Since the compounds are only active on people, there's no chance for the animal studies that are usually done during drug development. Bye-bye overdose? Third, pheromones may be impossible to overdose on, Berliner says, since the VNO receptors simply overload in the presence of excess pheromone. In that way, he adds, VNO receptors are similar to smell receptors, which stop responding to a constant stimulus. "When you go to a bar, you smell cigarette smoke, but after a few minutes, you don't smell anything, because you have saturated the receptors," he adds. Maybe not, says Wysocki, who notes that the drug could be taken up by the abundant blood supply in the nose. Birth control drugs are already dispensed into the nose in this way, and they, like some of the pheromones Berliner is investigating, are steroids. It's safe to say that Berliner's competitive instincts have caused a degree of secrecy that makes university scientists, who are used to more open sharing of results, uncomfortable. For years, he concealed the identity of his chemicals, yet without that information, nobody could replicate his results. In self defense, Berliner notes that "I come from the pharmaceutical industry, and we have to have a patent" to protect discoveries. Now that several patents have been issued, he says, some of the structures are public, and "people are starting to pick up on this." He says phero-medicines could reach the market within five years, if all goes well with regulators and experiments. But secrecy is still an issue, says Michael Meredith, of Florida State University, Tallahassee, who charges that Berliner's studies may not meet the standards of publication. In one case, he says, the applicator used to dispense the supposed pheromone in the nose was only described as "patent pending." That's hardly enough to allow another scientist to replicate the study, which is a fundamental requirement of published scientific studies. Isn't it always this way. Just when you start believing in something radical and exciting, along comes a group of convincing skeptics.

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