Menstrual Synchrony and Suppression by
Martha McClintock
Page 1
Do women who live together cycle together? Maybe, maybe not. See the
5 February 2008 New
York Times item for the latest about this.
But below is the history-making article
in the magazine Nature (vol. 229, pp. 244-245,
22 January 1971) that Martha McClintock based on what
she observed in a dormitory at Wellesley College
(Wellesley, Massachusetts, U.S.A.) (She received her bachelor's degree there
in 1969, as did Hillary Rodham Clinton. She
spoke at the 1997 conference of The Society for
Menstrual Cycle Research).)
Note her discussion of the influence of light
(which influences melatonin production, which in turn affects estrogen production)
and pheromones on menstrual periods.
By the way, menstrual drift was the term
apparently used early on, as related - in the MUM
News for February 2003 - by a nurse recounting her experience as a test
subject for the Rely tampon.
Read the story of how McClintock's article came about, below, from
pages 123-124 of Rebels in White
Gloves: Coming of Age with Hillary's Class - Wellesley '69 by Miriam
Horn, 1999. (A portion of the book was originally published in U.S. News
& World Report. Miriam Horn is a senior writer for U.S. News & World
Report.) I thank Laura Hussong Kole, Wellesley (College)'77, for sending
this to me:
Martha McClintock was just twenty years old when, perched at the edge
of a room full of the world's top biologists, she broke into their conversation
with an observation that would become the basis for a study of major scientific
importance. It was the summer after her junior year at Wellesley [College,
Wellesley, Massachusetts, U.S.A.], and Martha was invited, with a handful
of other students, to attend a conference at Jackson Laboratory in Maine.
The scientists were discussing pheromones - chemical messages that pass
between organisms without their conscious knowledge - and how they cause
female mice to ovulate all at the same time. McClintock recalled the event
for Chicago magazine: "Driven by curiosity despite my self-consciousness,
I mention that the same thing happens in humans. Didn't they know that?
All of them being male, they didn't. In fact,
I got the impression that they thought it was ridiculous.
But they had the courtesy to frame their skepticism as a scientific question:
'What is your proof?' I said it was what happened in my dormitory. And
they said unless you address it scientifically, that evidence is worthless."
Her Wellesley faculty adviser, Patricia Sampson, encouraged Martha
to take up the challenge, and the 135 women in her dorm agreed to participate.
Each woman recorded the dates (...) She wrote up
her results as her senior thesis and the next year, in graduate school
at Harvard, was urged by E.O. Wilson, the sociobiologist famous for his
studies of chemical signaling among ants, to submit her findings to Nature
magazine. Published in 1971, when Martha
was twenty-three, the
paper was the first scientific evidence ever presented of the functioning
of human pheromones.
Professor McClintock co-authored another amazing article
in the same magazine 27 years later, showing that human
pheromones cause the synchrony (Regulation
of ovulation by human pheromones, Kathleen Stern and Martha McClintock,
in Letters to Nature, Nature, vol. 392, pp. 177-179, 12 March 1998).
Professor McClintock, now at the University of Chicago, spoke at the
conference of The Society for Menstrual Cycle Research in June 1997; see
my report and photo of her.
See the SECOND and last part.
Nature
magazine kindly gave its permission to show this article.
|