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.
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