SEAT - STORY

The idea for this study came from a Dr Tom Clarke. He was a prison psychiatrist in
London in the 1970's. I believed that he later moved to Australia. Whilst I was doing
my PhD in Birmingham he contacted me as he wanted to work with me. He was
doing his MD on human pheromones (just a lit review as far as I could see). He asked
me to visit him in London to discuss some research ideas.

He told me that he had read my ideas about androstenone/ol and had done one or two
(uncontrolled) tests using androstenone. I got the idea for the dentist's waiting room
study from one of them. He had sprayed androstenone onto a seat during a party and
told me that "Only homosexual men sat on it". I asked him how he knew they were
homosexual. He replied along the lines "I'm a psychiatrist - I just know these things".
He got the idea from the Harlows’ classic baby monkey studies in the '50's where
baby monkeys stayed longer on a wire seat which had fur and the smell of the mother
on it.

Anyway, over a conversation in a pub (the Red Lion, Vicarage Rd, Birmingham...)
with some physicist friends from KCL (my degrees are in physics and molecular
biology from there) I suddenly saw that this notion of spraying a seat could be made
into a controlled, double-blind naturalistic study. I can imagine that I sketched it onto
a beer mat.

The university dental clinic was opposite the psychology department. I arranged a
meeting with the dentist in charge and explained my idea: “I think this might be an
aphrodisiac”. He was a sport and liked the idea and was willing to let me have his
receptionists collect the data.

I’d go in very early in the morning to clean and move the seats around and then do the
spraying once the cleaners had finished. I had piloted the amount to use so that it was
imperceptible to people sensitive to A’one. I also drew an A4 sheet of the waiting
room plan and photocopied lots of copies for the receptionist to fill in. There was very
little work involved.

Initially, my idea was to have a “frame shifting” design where I’d have a frame of
four days of “control, 1sec, 5 sec, 10 sec” repeated over the five days of several
weeks so that each week different days would have different conditions. As data were
collected I’d then analyse it until we got to significance, if it looked like something
was happening. Dr DA Booth, my supervisor, changed this to an ascending-
descending design where we had control weeks at the start and end and then different
spray times on weeks in between.

His idea of having a final control week to check that the selection of seats in the first
control week was not idiosyncratic (i.e., by accident women didn’t sit in other seats
the first week) is very good. However, the ascending descending design meant that we
might or might not have got enough data to pick up a significant effect. In the end,
we did get significant results but Dr Booth said that in retrospect the “frame shifting”
design would have been better (and I’d have added a final control week to check).
AFTER THE STUDY

I did the study in 1974/5 but I didn’t publish it until 1980 due to simple fed-upness
with writing up the PhD. It’s hard to go back through things that were so stressful and
boring. Incidentally, my PhD was meant to be in analytical chemistry – a GLC/MS
analysis of human body odours under stress, sexual excitement, etc., but Dr Booth’s
lab was closed shortly after I started and my PhD was moved to psychology (he was
also a psychologist).

I think I had finished my fellowship at U.Warwick at the time. Dr Booth arranged for
me to have a free office at U.Bham as an “Honorary Research Fellow” in order to
give me some incentive to write up. This had a free telephone and I had access to a
primitive main-frame text processor with laser printing. This was very handy for
writing up my MBA thesis as well.

Some time later, when I was working for Cambridge Life Science (maybe 1983), the
BBC produced an “Equinox” science program on human pheromones and I was
invited down to Shepherd’s Bush to record part of it. I had a flu/cold virus at the time
and was pale and tired. They decided not to interview me as I must have come across
badly. Instead, they had me recreate this study. I had to walk over to a set of seats,
open my briefcase, take out the can of “Boarmate” and spray a seat. We had to do
several takes as I had to show the can to the camera -and then I couldn’t work it, etc.,
various messes. It took longer than the actual study. It was a fun day - it was more
like playing than work, though union demarcation was obvious - they seemed to need
three people to hold a microphone.

I got an Equinox postcard from the BBC telling me the broadcast date. I was at
Cambridge Life Science the next day and everyone had seen it. They were amazed to
see me on TV as they hadn’t realized my PhD was in human pheromones. I think they
assumed it must have been in some sort of biotechnology or molecular biology PhD
given the work I did there.

I read later that this Equinox programme had the highest viewing figures of any
science programme. It was on the front cover of the Radio Times and this must have
helped.