Prairie voles are stocky rodents and Olympian tunnel borers that surface in grassy areas to feast on grass, roots and seeds with their chisel-like teeth, causing migraines in farmers and gardeners.
But for Larry Young, they were the secret to understanding romance and love.
Professor Young, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta, used prairie voles in a series of experiments that revealed the chemical process of the pirouette of thrilling emotions that poets have been trying to put into words for centuries.
He died on March 21 in Tsukuba, Japan, where he was helping to organize a scientific conference. He was 56 years old. The cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Anne Murphy.
With their beady eyes, thick tails, and sharp claws, prairie voles aren’t exactly cuddly. But among rodents, they are uniquely domestic: they are monogamous, and males and females form a family unit to raise their offspring together.
“Prairie voles, if you take away their partner, they exhibit depression-like behavior,” Professor Young told the Atlanta-Journal Constitution in 2009. “It’s almost like there’s a withdrawal of their partner.”
This made them ideal for laboratory studies examining the chemistry of love.
In a study Published in 1999, Professor Young and colleagues exploited the gene in prairie voles associated with signaling for vasopressin, a hormone that modulates social behavior. They stimulated vasopressin signaling in mice, which are very promiscuous.
The headlines were amused. “Gene swapping turns lecherous mice into devoted mates,” declared the Ottawa Citizen. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram: “Genetic science makes mice more romantic.” » The Independent in London: “Discovery of the “perfect husband” gene”.
Professor Young followed up with further prairie vole studies focusing on oxytocin, a hormone that stimulates contractions during childbirth and is involved in the bond between mothers and newborns.
“Because we knew that oxytocin was involved in the mother-infant bond, we explored whether oxytocin might be involved in this partner bond,” he said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2019.
It was.
“If you take two prairie voles, a male and a female, and this time you don’t let them mate and just give them a little oxytocin, they will bond,” Professor Young said. “So this was our first set of experiments to show that oxytocin was involved in things other than maternal bonding.”
He also injected female prairie voles with a drug that blocks oxytocin, which made them temporarily polygamous.
“Love doesn’t really fly,” writes Professor Young in “The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex, and the Science of Attraction” (2012, with Brian Alexander). “The complex behaviors surrounding these emotions are driven by a few molecules present in our brain. It is these molecules, acting on defined neural circuits, that so powerfully influence some of the largest…
