It's Monday morning, and once again Brad Murray finds himself in the position of research subject: lying flat on his back on a lab bench, flaring his nostrils for science.
Luis Monti-Bloch bends over the supine graduate student and, murmuring apologetically, sticks a stork-bill-shaped instrument called a nasal speculum into the left chamber of Murray's nose. The subject flinches but hangs tough as Monti-Bloch spreads the bifurcated beak of the speculum, thereby enlarging the aperture of Murray's own beak. The researcher trains the light from his headlamp into the orifice. He peers through his binocular loupes.
"I can see it right . . . there," says Monti-Bloch, pointing with a cotton swab. He adjusts the loupes, his gaze never straying from Murray's mucosa. He sighs. "It's really beautiful."
Monti-Bloch is one of half a dozen distinguished scientists who believe they've discovered a new sense organ half an inch or so inside the human nose. It's called the vomeronasal organ, or VNO, and if the hunches of these researchers are correct, it detects chemical signals passed unconsciously among human beings--signals that might be about identity, arousal, or sexual receptivity and that go by the name of pheromones. Such chemical communication, common among other animals, was heretofore thought to be nonexistent in humans.
Using stalwart volunteers like Murray and equipment he designed himself, Monti-Bloch has been testing the effects of putative human pheromones on cells in the VNO. To do so, he has to locate the organ's opening, a pale, tiny pit near the bottom of the septal wall dividing the nose. Assuming that Murray is bilaterally symmetrical like the rest of us, a matching inlet lies on the other side of the septum, too. It's not the kind of thing you'd notice on casual inspection.
