The Chemistry (Literally) of Social Interaction

[Dover]

CONVERSATION WITH MARTHA MCCLINTOCK
The Chemistry (Literally) of Social Interaction
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS

Published: November 16, 2004


HICAGO - For much of her career, Dr. Martha McClintock, the experimental psychologist, has been stunning the scientific world with research on how social interactions affect biology in humans and animals.

The director of the University of Chicago's Institute for Mind and Biology, Dr. McClintock tends to investigate matters that are at once important and obvious.

In 1971 she published her first scientific paper - a study showing that women living together in a Wellesley College dormitory tended to menstruate at the same time. The idea grew out of her own undergraduate observations. Dr. McClintock, 57, has demonstrated chemical communication between humans in laboratory experiments, again in influencing menstrual cycles. Whether pheromones play a role in human life outside the lab remains unknown. In animals pheromones affect the whole panoply of behavior - mating, aggression and fear.

In other work with colleagues, she has proved that rats that fear change have shorter lives than their more flexible counterparts, and that social isolation can also affect the longevity of rodents.

"I've focused my work on downward causation, the idea that the social and psychological world changes the fundamental mechanisms of biology, and vice versa," Dr. McClintock said on a recent afternoon at her offices at the University of Chicago. "I've tried to situate biology in a rich social and psychological context and make it simple." ...cont'd

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/16/science/16conv.html?ex=1101272400&en=cb514ee6d48944b1&ei=5040&partner=MOREOVER