Love and Other Dangerous Chemicals E-Book

Anthony Capella

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 431

Beschreibung

When a gorgeous girl and a brainy boy experiment, sparks will fly... An original and very funny romantic comedy from the bestselling author of The Food of Love For Dr Steven J. Fisher, love is no more than a chemical equation - and he's nearly solved it. A brilliant young biochemist who spends all his time in an Oxford research lab studying orgasms, Fisher is on the brink of inventing a Viagra-like pill for women. For the pharma company that funds his work, the discovery of 'Whoosh!' (originally named 'Desiree' before they realised that was a kind of potato) will be a history-changing event. But, just weeks before the product is due to launch, a last-minute case study ruins Fisher's perfect results. 'Miss G', an orgasmically-challenged PhD arts student (special subject: Victorian semicolons), isn't responding to the tests as expected. Strangely, the only stimulus to provoke a reaction is Dr Fisher's own voice. As the scientist and his subject bond over Bunsen burner-lit meals, argue over Pink Floyd and converse in Runish at sessions of Swamps and Sorcerers, Dr Fisher's feelings crop up in the most unscientific ways... Fisher usually has answers to everything, from the chemical composition of tears to the evolutionary reasons for kissing. But now he's facing the most bewildering puzzle of his career: what's love got to do with it? Could the outdated research of the Romantic poets enlighten him at all? With all this new data, he needs a new hypothesis. But what if there are some things science can't explain?

Leseprobe

Pages 170, 171, 178: Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence published by Penguin and Cambridge University Press. Reproduced by permission of Pollinger Limited and the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli.

First published in the United States of America in 2009, by Touchstone.

This edition first published in the UK in 2012 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Anthony Strong, 2012.

The moral right of Anthony Strong to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 9780857890252 (paperback) ISBN: 9780857897244 (eBook)

Printed in Great Britain.

Corvus An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZwww.corvus-books.co.uk

CONTENTS

Female sexual dysfunction: some research issues

1.1

2.1

3.1

4.1

5.1

6.1

7.1

8.1

9.1

10.1

11.1

12.1

13.1

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15.1

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17.1

18.1

19.1

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21.1

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25.1

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29.1

30.1

31.1

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33.1

34.1

35.1

36.1

37.1

38.1

39.1

40.1

41.1

42.1

43.1

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50.1

51.1

52.1

53.1

Female sexual dysfunction: some research issues

by Dr Steven J. Fisher, Department of Molecular Biology, University of Oxford. International Journal of Sexual Biology 2008 May; 29(3):701-50

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Male sexual dysfunction has been well described in the literature. The compound sildenafil citrate, marketed by Pfizer under the brand name Viagra, has created a market estimated at over $1billion annually. This has led to speculation that a drug targeted at female sexual dysfunction or FSD will be “the big pharmaceuticals’ next miracle cure” (Newsnight, June 2007). However, the existence of FSD, and therefore of a treatment to combat it, remains controversial.

METHOD: The author describes a project to investigate a possible treatment for FSD, and cautions that some previously unconsidered factors may affect clinical outcomes. He describes in particular the case of Miss G, a research subject.

DISCUSSION: This paper was first presented at the conference “Towards a Sexual-Dysfunction-Free Future 2008”, sponsored by Trock Pharmaceuticals, where it provoked a lively response (see, for example, the correspondence pages of this journal, passim).

INTERESTS: The author acknowledges the generous funding of the Trock Pharmaceuticals Research Foundation. This funding has since been withdrawn.

1.1

Twenty-eight women have now participated in the sexual dysfunction research project here at the Department of Molecular Biology, Oxford University. Our approach is empirical: that is to say, the treatment, a synthetic enzyme codenamed KXC79, is adjusted in response to each set of results. All the participants are volunteers and are assessed by my colleague Dr Susan Minstock using a number of standard evaluations (the Derogatis Sexual Functioning Inventory, the Locke-Wallace Marital Adjustment Test, the Female Sexual Function Index, etc) before a decision is made as to whether they are suitable for inclusion. It is always explained to the volunteers exactly what the study will involve; to date, thirty-one potential subjects have subsequently declined to take part. Nevertheless, early results have been encouraging (see, for example, Fisher, S.J and Minstock, S, 2007: KXC79 and female sexual dysfunction: some encouraging early results).

Miss G was slightly unusual in that she was a postgraduate student here at the university who heard about the project from one of our research assistants.1 Strictly speaking, this was a breach of our selection protocol. However, Miss G worked in a completely different field, English Literature, and in all other respects fulfilled our criteria: she was anorgasmic and had previously consulted a doctor “to make sure it wasn’t just a virus”. (Notes were kept from initial and subsequent interviews: in addition, like all our volunteers, Miss G was encouraged to keep a record of her subjective responses during the trial.) She had also experienced relationship problems:

It wasn’t just that I couldn’t have orgasms – it was the fact that sex was such a big part of his life, and I couldn’t share that. I simply had no interest in it. Almost as if I were going out with a football fan, but was bored by sport.

Based on this discussion and the questionnaires, Dr Minstock made a provisional diagnosis of Hypoactive Arousal Disorder and accepted her onto the study.

I myself met Miss G for the first time when she came to the lab for her induction. As this meeting, apparently so ordinary, was in some ways the beginning of the whole fiasco, I suppose I should at this point pause to note my initial impressions of her – as a person, I mean. The truth, though, is that I did not really have any. If I may be allowed a small subjective observation of my own, what I recall most is being somewhat annoyed she was there at all: my understanding was that the data-collection phase of our study was completed, at least for the time being, while I prepared our findings for publication. This was work that required a great deal of concentration, and when Dr Minstock showed someone into the lab I did not, at first, look up from my computer.

“This is where the hands-on part happens,” my colleague was saying. “When I say hands-on, of course, I don’t necessarily mean that literally. We’ve got toys to suit every taste.”

Needless to say, I did not respond to this, either. Dr Minstock’s jocular manner, which she frequently assures me is simply a psychological stratagem to put test subjects and co-workers at their ease, on occasion strays – it seems to me – into flippancy. Great scientists of the past – men such as James Watson and Francis Crick, when they were engaged in their revolutionary work on DNA – never felt the need to be flippant. But Dr Minstock, as a sexologist, does not have quite the same regard for scientific method that I do.

“That’s Dr Fisher, who’s in charge of the biochemical side,” she added in a deafening whisper. “Working away, as usual! Don’t worry, we won’t disturb him if we’re quiet. Over here’s the photoplethagraph – basically it’s like a little light we pop inside so we can see what’s going on –”

“Photoplethysmograph,” I said, still without raising my head.

“What?”

“That is a photoplethysmograph, not a photoplethagraph. It calibrates reflected light. The darker the flush, the greater the vasodilation.”

“Oh, yes,” Dr Minstock said brightly. “Photoplethysmograph. Of course.”

“What’s ‘vasodilation’?”

I did look up then. There was something about the voice that had just spoken – something wry, ironic even; as if the speaker were somehow mocking herself for not knowing the answer.

Or – it occurred to me a fraction of a second later – as if she were somehow mocking me for knowing it.

In short, I thought I had discerned in the way our visitor had spoken a spark of real intelligence, an impression only partially dispelled by her appearance. I did not at that point know Miss G was an arts graduate, but I could probably have deduced it. She was attractive; strikingly so – I might as well make that clear at the outset. But she was striking, if this makes sense, in an entirely unremarkable way. A pleasant face, torn jeans, a cashmere pullover, a book bag, a knitted cap; and, spilling out from under the cap, a fine mass of chestnut-brown hair, as squeaky-clean and glossy as a freshly-peeled conker. One could imagine that if one were to touch it, the hair would be expensive and soft, just like the pullover. Clearly, she was not part of the university I inhabit, bounded as it is by the Rutherford Laboratories on one side and the Science Parks on the other. Hers was another Oxford entirely, a city of drama societies and college balls and open-top sports cars roaring of for candlelit meals in country pubs. In that Oxford, which overlaps mine while barely impinging upon it, girls like her are . . . I almost want to say “two-a-penny”, but of course they are considerably more expensive than that: their cashmere pullovers, their poise, and even their places at Oxford are the products of costly private educations.

So I glanced at Miss G and immediately thought that I knew her type; a type which was both as familiar and as alien to me as if she were a member of another species.

In this, as it later turned out, I was quite wrong.

“Vasodilation,” I said, “relates to blood flow. Specifically, engorgement of the surface capillaries due to physiological stimulation.”

“Anything you want to know about the technical stuff, Steve’s your boy,” Dr Minstock said, with a little roll of the eyes which clearly suggested that knowing about the technical stuff was a long way down her own list of priorities.

“Actually,” Miss G said, “there was something...”

“I just need to check that file,” my colleague said quickly. “Back in five.” As she left it seemed to me that she gave the other woman a pitying look, as if to say “I warned you”.

I sighed as I turned back to our visitor. “What did you want to know?”

“This treatment of yours,” Miss G said hesitantly. “It’s something like Viagra, presumably?”

I regret to say that even before she had finished this question I was smiling slightly at its naivety. “Not in the least, no. Viagra would be completely the wrong approach for any problem you might have.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, I can tell you if you like,” I said. “But I very much doubt you’ll be able to grasp the answer.”

She looked at me then in a rather level way, and I thought I detected a slight tightening of her jaw.

“Dr Fisher,” she said carefully, “I have a double first class honours degree from Bristol University, an MPhil from Cambridge, and I’m three-quarters of the way to completing a DPhil here at Oxford. How about you try me?”

1.2

My explanation will undoubtedly seem rather simplistic to my present audience, but for the sake of establishing exactly what I said to Miss G, I will repeat it here. “The active ingredient in sildenafil citrate, or Viagra, is a specific inhibitor of phosphodiesterase 5,” I pointed out. “This cleaves the ring form of cyclic GMP, a cellular messenger very similar to CAMP. The inhibition of the phosphodiesterase thus allows for the persistence of CGMP, which in turn promotes the release of nitric oxide into the corpus cavernosa of the penis.”

She nodded slowly. “You’re quite right.”

“Of course. The mechanism is relatively well understood.” I turned back to my computer screen.

“No, I meant you’re right that I didn’t understand. Not a word. Mind you,” she went on, almost to herself, “it’s got a sort of music to it, hasn’t it, and I don’t always understand a piece of Tennyson or Keats when I first hear it, either. Sometimes you have to sort of...feel the meaning before you can work out the details, don’t you? So let’s see...what you’re saying is that once the phospho thingy, the phosphodiesterase, is taken out of the equation, and the cyclic GMP does its stuff, it’s basically a question of nitric oxide, which must be a gas, so really it’s just about hydraulics.”

I must admit, I was quite intrigued that she had managed to work out the gist of what I was saying from so little actual knowledge. But that, I suppose, is one of the differences between science and the arts – they are positively encouraged to speculate beyond the realms of what they know, whereas for us, of course, it would be anathema. “Approximately, yes,” I said. “Women’s sexual responses are rather more complicated.”

“Ah. Now there, perhaps, I can correct you. You mean ‘complex’.”

I frowned. “It’s the same thing, surely.”

She shook her head. “‘Complicated’ means something difficult, but ultimately knowable. ‘Complex’ implies something which has so many variables and unknowns it can only be appreciated intuitively – something beyond the reach of rational analysis, like poetry or literature or love.” And then, somewhat to my surprise, she recited what I took to be some lines of verse.

“When two are stripped, long ere the course begin

We wish that one should lose, the other win.

And one especially do we affect

Of two gold ingots, like in each respect:

The reason, no man knows. Let it suffice,

What we behold is censured by our eyes.

Where both deliberate, the love is slight.

Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?”

“Marlowe, Christopher,” she added. “1564 to 1593.” “Then I stand corrected,” I said. “But even so, I still think I mean ‘complicated’.”

And then she asked the question that started the landslide. “Oh? Why?”

1.3

I rarely get the opportunity to talk about my work. Because of the various irrational taboos surrounding the physiology of sexual response, and the even greater taboo surrounding scientific discourse, I find that when I try to explain to people what I do, either their eyes glaze over or they become embarrassed. So when someone asks me a straightforward question I take the view that the more I can dispel their ignorance with a straightforward answer, the better.

“What you call love,” I said, “by which I assume you actually mean romantic attraction, is a relatively simple phenomenon – cascades of a chemical called phenyl ethylamine gush through the central nervous system, inducing various emotional responses ranging from anxiety to a heightened need for touch. We know what it is, we know how it works, and, crucially, we know what it’s for. Evolutionary theory, Miss G, teaches us that everything in the human body has a purpose. Our feet are shaped the way they are so that we can walk upright on the grassy savannah. Our thumbs work the way they do so that we can shape simple tools. Our hair is sleek and soft and glossy so that our sweat glands can work effectively. The male orgasm is another case in point. It has one purpose, and one purpose only: the continuation of the human race. Any pleasure we feel is simply the bribe by which nature induces us to spread our genes more widely.

“If you hook a man up to a scanner during climax, you see a localised, muscular spasm lasting about six seconds: highly functional, but with little variation. A woman, on the other hand, gets pulled into it gradually, building up her orgasm in a series of waves.” At this point, I believe, I crossed to a whiteboard and sketched a brief illustration of the process, something along the lines of figures 1 and 2.

“First comes the excitement stage,” I explained. “Here. There’s a reddening of your face, chest and neck, akin to a measles rash. A feeling of warmth pervades your pelvis. Your genitals engorge with blood; your pulse races, your limbs relax; you find it difficult to keep your mouth closed or control the sounds you make. A cocktail of stimulants, including dopamine and serotonin, are flooding your bloodstream, sensitising your nerve endings and giving you a rushing sensation. Round about here,” I indicated with my dry marker, “your breathing becomes fast and shallow. Your capillaries dilate further, flushing your skin, which simultaneously becomes damp with perspiration. You are now at the stage scientists call ‘the plateau’, in which you feel as if you are being swept along on a rushing current of sensations. Synapses start firing in the right-hand side of your brain, the creative side, creating a flickering storm of electrical activity. Your nipples swell like berries. Here a chemical called oxytocin gushes from your pituitary gland, inducing an overwhelming feeling of euphoria. You gasp, you bite your lover’s neck, you shudder uncontrollably and your lips contort.

Figure 1: Typical male response.

Figure 2: Three different female responses.

“Yet all this has just been the curtain raiser for the main event. Here your whole body stiffens. You have reached the point of no return, a feeling sometimes described as like being suspended at the top of a very high swing. You take a gulp of air and hold your breath, or grab your ankles and bellow. A pronounced frown – the so-called ‘orgasm face’ – is a testament to the myotonic tension now building in your muscles.”

I glanced at Miss G’s face. She was frowning with concentration as she tried to follow what I was saying, but I could see that she was more or less keeping up, so I continued. “At around this point, here, the long tissues of the arms and legs also contract in involuntary spasms. A shower of electrical signals twangs up and down the vagus nerve, like vibrations bouncing along a tightrope. A fendishly intricate chain of biochemical reactions, only recently understood by science,2 lights up your brain like a switchboard. The central nervous system goes into overload; patterns dance behind your eyes; you feel yourself propelled, judderingly, as if travelling fast over rough ground in a flimsy vehicle.

“But only now, here, do you finally abandon yourself to what is happening. A cascade of muscular contractions, each one exactly 0.8 seconds long, pulses from your genitals, pushing outwards, until there is no part of you, from the centre of your hips to the tips of your fingers, that isn’t dancing to the same primeval beat. And then at last, here, it finally lets you go, although you may find after-shocks occurring up to half an hour later. For around thirty seconds, Miss G – perhaps for as long as three whole minutes – you have been in the grip of a sensation more intense, more extraordinary, than any male has ever felt.”3

There was a brief silence. It occurred to me that the use of the word “you” might not be strictly accurate in this instance, since Miss G would presumably not have been there in the first place unless she was having difficulty with some or all of this process.

“That is the how,” I continued. “But the interesting question, the question which has perplexed scientists ever since we started looking at this area, is the one you asked just now.”

“‘Why?’”

“Exactly. What is it all for? The clitoris appears to be the only organ in the body which has no function other than pleasure; the female orgasm the only physiological mechanism for which we can find no evolutionary purpose. It isn’t necessary for conception; it isn’t needed for eating, or sleeping, or raising young; it confers no advantage that can be passed on to the next generation. According to all the principles of natural selection, it shouldn’t exist. But it does. And – even more fascinatingly – it sometimes goes wrong, for reasons we still can’t entirely fathom either.

“That is the great mystery – and the great prize. In an age when we know almost everything there is to know about almost everything, the female orgasm is one of the few remaining puzzles. Your genitalia, Miss G, are the final frontier of scientific knowledge, the last great unexplored territory. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that scientists know more about the woolly mammoth than we do about your climaxes – and the woolly mammoth is extinct! But that’s changing now. Little by little, the bright light of research is illuminating the dark recesses of ignorance, and soon there will be no problem or glitch caused by Nature for which Science does not have an opposite and equal solution.”

I stopped, aware that I had spoken at rather greater length, and possibly with rather more passion, than I had intended to.

“Goodness,” Miss G said, and once again I had the feeling that she might be mocking me, just a little. “You make it sound so much fun, as well. So, when do I start?”

1.4

I explained, of course, what the actual tests would involve – that she would be connected to instruments measuring blood flow, muscular activity, pH and so on. In order that she would fully understand what I was talking about, I even took her to the testing room and showed her the couch, with its hygienic paper cover, its lines of tiny plastic crocodile clips and its electro-conductive pads. It is at this point that many potential volunteers back out. Miss G, however, took it all in her stride, asking several intelligent questions about the different pieces of equipment, such as the Schuster balloon and the Geer Gauge, and even – somewhat to my surprise – observing that the software which linked them was not Windows or Apple but Linux.4

“I’m a part-time programer for the Tennysonline project,” she explained. “The coding would be a nightmare if we didn’t use open-source.”

I noticed her looking rather anxiously, though, at the array of devices by means of which arousal is induced. These range from a small monitor on which we can play video clips, to various kinds of transcutaneous electromechanical apparatus. The latter are necessarily rather more industrial in appearance than their high street equivalents, something which our subjects can find rather daunting (Figure 3). I tried to reassure her by explaining that the difference was partly because we had to be able to vary the input from the control room next door.

“So you control what’s happening to me? Just by pushing some buttons in there?”

“Indeed. That way we can standardise the experience, and determine whether the treatment is working.”

“And how many times will I have to do all this? Before I’m cured, I mean?”

Figure 3: Some high street stimulators (top) and their laboratory equivalents (below).

“I don’t think you quite understand,” I said. “This is a research project, not a doctor’s surgery. There are no guarantees of improvement.”

“But you’ve seen some encouraging results? Or was that paper you published last year over-stating?”

“Ah.” I had never before been confronted with a research subject who had actually read up on the research in question, and for a moment I was at a loss as to how to respond in order to avoid any possibility of a placebo effect. “The paper was sound. But the science is highly advanced. I very much doubt whether you understood it correctly.”

This seemed to satisfy her – although she opened her mouth as if to comment further, she closed it again without speaking. I turned to indicate Dr Minstock, who was by now loitering ostentatiously. “Now, unless you have any more questions, I will leave you in Susan’s capable hands. I should explain, by the way, that she is a sexologist, while I am a neurobiologist. But we get along perfectly well.” That, of course, is a joke, though admittedly not one which many people outside the fields of sexology or neurobiology would appreciate. As they left the room Susan said something to Miss G, something too low for me to catch, followed by a barely-suppressed cackle of witchy laughter. Generally I am immune to my colleague’s so-called “empathy-building” remarks at my expense, but on this occasion – I suppose because, somewhat unexpectedly, I had actually quite enjoyed my conversation with Miss G – it annoyed me. I went into the control room and poured myself a beaker of water until I had regained my composure.

1.5

When I told Miss G that Susan and I get along, that was true, generally speaking. When I was first given funding by Trock – really substantial funding; funding that transformed my little theory about primates into a full-scale human research project almost overnight – the pharmaceutical giant imposed only one condition: that I was to bring a female sexologist on board. It wasn’t easy, at first, sharing my project. But eventually Susan and I got used to each other – one of our research assistants remarked that it was almost like a marriage, but with rather more sex – and in any case, excitement about what we were doing helped smooth any difficulties between us.

I need hardly tell this paper’s audience that, in the great race to bring a successful treatment for female sexual dysfunction to market, a race currently taking place in clinics and laboratories all over the world, our little team is widely considered one of the frontrunners. Oh, others may have reached the clinical phase before us; some may even have fled patents. By comparison, our progress has been slow but steady. While our rivals rushed to publish wild conjecture masquerading as research, we preferred to test and refine: methodically exploring every avenue, no matter how unpromising; eliminating every false trail, no matter how seductive; checking and replicating every tiny success, in order that our method would eventually be seen to be as sound as our results. And now the prize was almost within our grasp. I don’t mean money, of course, although for our backers that must surely follow. I mean acclaim: the chance to have our names spoken in the same breath as those of the great scientific pioneers, people such as Chadwick, Townes and Koch; even – I may dare to believe – James Watson and Francis Crick. Under that sort of pressure, a few small personality clashes are almost inevitable.

But there have also been occasions when I have become aware that Susan thinks I am – how can I put this? – somewhat staid. I suppose this shouldn’t have come as a surprise: sexologists are by the nature of their profession a rather wilder bunch than us neurobiologists. There was one occasion in particular, at last year’s Sexual Endocrinology conference, when I had to go to her hotel room to collect some papers I wanted to look at before the following morning’s session. I had already got ready for bed, so rather than get dressed again I simply put a hotel towelling robe on, over my nightclothes. I thought as I knocked at her door I could hear voices, but if I assumed anything it was simply that she had the TV on. Then the door was pulled open. Susan stood there, dressed in a loose towelling robe herself – but she, I couldn’t help but notice, was not wearing nightclothes underneath. In one hand she held a tumbler of drink. From inside the room drifted a herby odour which I took to be marijuana. On the bed behind her I caught a sudden, shocking glimpse of writhing naked bodies, and I heard a woman’s voice – I am fairly sure it was Heather Jackson, a particularly attractive research student who had recently started working for us – laugh throatily. A man’s voice, somewhat muffled, growled something in response.

Susan quickly stepped forward, blocking my view. I explained what I wanted and she went to get me the papers, closing the door again until she had returned.

Then, as I started to walk away, she called after me, as if on an impulse. “Steve?”

I turned.

“You know,” she said, somewhat slurrily, “you should lighten up a bit.”

I didn’t reply. I took the papers back to my room but for once my mind was incapable of processing the formulae on them. I found myself realising, almost for the first time, that what I was reading – the complex interplay of neurotransmitters and secretions, hormones and platelets, desire and arousal, my life’s work – was all about sex: actual, flesh-and-blood bodies, writhing together like that knot of naked sexologists cavorting on Susan’s bed. It may sound odd, but it wasn’t something that had ever really occurred to me before – or at least, if I had acknowledged it, it had only been on an intellectual level. And I was disappointed, too, with Heather, whom I had believed to be a more serious academic than her behaviour that evening had revealed her to be. That night I did not sleep well, and my paper next day on the climax of the female pygmy chimpanzee was one of the worst-delivered I have ever given.5 I kept hearing that throaty female laugh coming from the bed, and the muffled deeper voice answering it.

Nevertheless, it was sensible of Trock to insist on my partner being a woman. Susan takes care of the difficult part, the interaction with our volunteers; attaching all the plastic clips, explaining how to use the mechanical devices, carrying out psychological counselling and so on. Now that I think about it, it was perhaps a good thing that the volunteers themselves were unaware – presumably – of the omnivorous nature of her own tastes, as revealed by that glimpse into her hotel room. But whatever her other failings, I really cannot fault her manner with our test subjects, with whom she never seemed less than totally professional.

2.1

The testing room, as I have explained, is separated from the rest of the lab, to foster an impression of privacy. In the control booth, I opened the microphone channels and heard my colleague’s voice say, “So that one just eases in there – whoops – a little closer to the couch, if you could, the lead won’t reach that far. That one’s a snapper. Great.”

I brought up Startle on my laptop. This showed a view of Miss G’s left eye, magnified a hundred times. I adjusted the focus, and on my screen the giant disembodied iris also adjusted itself, the pupil opening and closing as Miss G settled (Figure 4). She had unusually-coloured eyes for a brunette – the bluey-grey-brown double-recessive must have been present in both her parents.

“So what happens now?” her voice said, breaking into my reverie.

I activated my own microphone. “We wait. KXC79 – the pill Susan gave you – takes around fifteen minutes to pass into your bloodstream.”6

Figure 4: Miss G’s left iris

There was a short silence, during which Susan joined me in the control room and we began going through the pre-test checks. Visitors have occasionally likened our little booth to the cockpit of a 747 before take off – crammed into the tiny space are over thirty different monitoring devices, all of which need to be primed and readied before the tests begin.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw my colleague looking puzzled. “This is odd,” she whispered, pulling of her headset. “The vibration meter is showing quite intense activity, but my inputs are set almost at zero.”

I looked at the readouts. Sure enough, they appeared to show that Miss G was oscillating at a steady 14hz. It was most perplexing.

“Whatever it is, it’s not responding to any of my controls,” Susan said, twisting a knob at random. “Could she have brought her own stimulator? I didn’t think to ask –”

Then I realised what was causing the instruments to read as they were. For all her apparent self-assurance, the woman on the testing couch was trembling; trembling like a leaf. This, of course, was something of a problem – the data would be worthless if we were unable to distinguish between the different stimuli that had generated it. “Perhaps some music will help,” I said, turning to the CD player.

Swooping, melodic sine waves and polytones began colliding in our headsets, re-emerging as something completely different and utterly beautiful – an extraordinary mixture of music and mathematics. “What’s this?” Susan said, frowning.

“Tomita. Pictures at an Exhibition. I must have left it in the machine – I was listening to it earlier. Did you want the Barry White?”

“Well, this is hardly going to put her in the mood, is it?”

“On the contrary,” I said, indicating the instruments, where the trembling was already subsiding. “It seems to be having exactly the desired effect.”

Susan shrugged and turned back to the controls. “Let’s get on with it, then, shall we?” She reactivated her headset microphone. “Annie, I’m going to start a very gentle stimulation device. At this stage we’re not looking to do any more than relax you. Later on you’ll notice it getting rather more intense.” By her elbow an oscillograph came to life, its flower-like pattern opening and closing in time to the neurostimulator’s output.

There was a silence which lasted for almost the entire first movement of Pictures at an Exhibition.

“Dr Fisher?” Miss G’s voice said.

“Yes?”

“Could you tell me a bit more about that pill? How it’s going to affect me, I mean?”

“Don’t you worry about that, Annie,” Susan cut in. “You just lie back and enjoy the ride.”

“It’s a neurotransmitter,” I said without thinking.

After a moment I heard Miss G’s voice again. “Sorry, Dr Fisher. You’re going to have to explain what that is.”

On my left, Susan pointed urgently at the clock and shook her head, mouthing a silent “No” in my direction. Presumably she was fretting about losing KXC79’s window of optimum effectiveness. But her anxiety, I noted, was misplaced: there was still at least another minute to go.

“Well, different parts of the body communicate with each other by sending messages through the cells,” I said. “It’s a bit like a computer network – each cell has a little wif station, known as the presynaptic nerve terminal –”

Susan was by now waving one painted fingernail vigorously back and forth across her throat.

“So once a receptor site has been activated, you either get a de-polarisation, which means it has what we call an excitatory postsynaptic potential –”

Susan threw up her hands, rolling her eyes at me in a soundless parody of bewilderment.

“– or hyperpolarisation, which means it has an inhibitory postsynaptic potential,” I concluded (Figure 5). “And that’s it, really.”

“Finally!” Susan muttered, reaching for the controls.

“To put that in layman’s terms...”

“Dear God!”

“...a depolarisation makes it more likely that an action potential will fire, while a hyperpolarisation has the opposite effect. KXC79 is just amplifying that natural process.”

“And that’s the end of the science bit,” Susan said quickly. “Annie, we’re going to move this up a notch. Try to think some nice erotic thoughts. If you can.” She gave me a poisonous look, pushed some buttons, and the familiar background hum of electromechanical devices whirring into life began to crackle on the headsets.

Figure 5: How a neurotransmitter works.

2.2

We sat in silence for a while, watching the readouts.

“This is looking surprisingly positive,” Susan murmured. “I’m going to go to four.”

The hum intensified.

“The KXC79 should just about be peaking,” she added. “I’ll see if we can’t –” She pushed some more buttons. “And a bit more of this.” She twisted a knob. “OK. Let’s see what’s cooking.”

I switched to the heat-sensitive thermograph, looking for the tell-tale pattern spreading across Miss G’s chest and neck that would indicate an arousal flush. So far, nothing. There was little I could usefully do to help now, so I got on with plotting the data from previous test subjects on a spreadsheet according to their ethnicity.

After another four minutes Susan pushed another switch. “We seem to be losing the... But perhaps...” She twisted a dial towards the maximum.

I glanced at Startle. The screen was completely blank. Then I saw that this was because Miss G’s eye was in fact now closed. According to the respirometer, she was breathing deeply and regularly – almost, in fact, as if she were fast asleep.

A delicate snore began to make itself heard on our headsets.

“Is she asleep?” Susan said incredulously.

“It appears so.”

“How extraordinary. Well, there’s not much point in continuing with this.” My colleague began briskly flicking switches to their of positions. “Annie? Annie, wake up.”

“Wha? Soz. Was that OK?” Miss G’s voice asked, a little groggily.

“It was fine. I’m just sorry it wasn’t a bit more...eventful for you.”

“Oh, it was nice,” Miss G said. “Nicer than usual, anyway.”

“Perhaps Dr Fisher made it all just a bit too relaxing. Or perhaps it’s some little problem we haven’t spotted with the treatment.”

“I’m sorry if that wasn’t much use, Dr Fisher,” Miss G called.

I hastened to reassure her. “Oh no, that isn’t the case at all. It isn’t an experiment if you know the result in advance – that’s the whole basis of scientific investigation. And anyway, that was only a very mild dose. I’m going to give you a skin patch to wear for a week or so. It’s just like a nicotine patch, really, except that it’ll be raising your background levels of KXC79. Hopefully when you come back we’ll see a very marked difference in your responses.”

2.3

Sometimes our subjects like to chat after a session, so Susan has evolved a debriefing procedure that gathers more feedback in the post-test period. In Miss G’s case, however, there had been so little reaction it was barely necessary, and it was only a few minutes before my colleague rejoined me in the control room.

She picked up a readout from the EMG and began to cross-check the results. “Interesting girl.”

“Yes.”

“I wonder why she didn’t –”

Suddenly we were both talking over each other. “You must have misjudged –”

“If you had prepared her properly –”

“You actually bored her to sleep. To sleep! I mean, that has to be a first. Even for you.”

We worked for a while in a furious silence.

“That’s odd.” Susan was studying the printout.

“What is?”

“There’s a small escalation about seven minutes in.”

“What happened at seven minutes? Is that when we increased the stimulation?”

“That’s what I’m checking.” Susan was running her finger down the list of Stimulation Events. “No. According to this, seven minutes was before the actual tests had started.”

“Play the tapes,” I said. But Susan, ahead of me, was already winding the audio tapes back to the right place.

“Here we are. Six minutes fifty,” she said, pressing Play. I heard my own voice saying: “So once a receptor site has been activated, you either get a depolarisation, which means it has what we call an excitatory post-synaptic potential, or hyperpolarisation, which means it has an inhibitory postsynaptic potential...”

Susan pressed Stop. “Must be an RAE.”

RAEs – Random Arousal Events – are a recurrent difficulty in our line of work (Figure 6). Put simply, people sometimes react in odd ways, and at odd moments, for reasons neither they nor we can fully explain. We tend to exclude RAEs from our data, because if we didn’t, nothing would ever make any sense.

“Another one?” I said. “That’s the third this month.” And we carried on packing up the equipment.

Figure 6: EMG showing Miss G’s Random Arousal Event at 06.50 (top). The lower line is just me talking.

3.1

Time is an interesting phenomenon, isn’t it? Normally, it flows from A to B, and thus to C and so on, in a pretty straight line.7 And this, frankly, is the way we scientists like it. For all our talk of wormholes and relativity and the space-time continuum, we actually prefer our time quite classical. When we describe a discovery, especially, we tend to relate the events and experiments which led up to it in the order in which they happened, rather than in the order in which we became aware of them. Thus do we give the impression of a planned, methodical progression towards an inevitable truth, rather than the chaos of half-glimpsed solutions, blind alleys, false dawns and wild guesses that – if we are honest – actually occurred.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that the document I am about to quote from is one with which I only became familiar much later. Needless to say, events might have proceeded very differently had I been made aware of its contents at the time.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I draw your attention to Appendix A: Miss G’s private diary.

3.2

Ugh! I still can’t believe that I’m going to write a blog – sorry, diary – about my sex life. Or lack of it.

But apparently it’s a necessary part of the study that I keep a record of how sexy I feel. Dr Minstock – Susan – says it’s all part of learning to be intimate with myself and that it’ll liberate my inner feminine or something. (Random question: why does “intimate” mean sexual? When “intimation” means a thought or idea? Must look that up later.) Susan, I suspect, would prefer me to pen this by candlelight in some scented leatherbound notebook scattered with rose petals. I told her no way am I putting anything on paper. Quite apart from the environmental cost, what if someone finds it? At least this computer is password protected. No one will ever read these words except me.

Another weird thought.

So here goes.

This whole thing started when Simon decided I had a problem. It seems my lack of enthusiasm in bed was making him unhappy.

“So do you want to stop having sex with me?” I asked.

“Of course not,” he said, a little tetchily. “Making love to you is utterly sublime, my darling. I’m just wondering what we can do to make it even better.”

“I wouldn’t mind stopping,” I said. “In fact, that probably would make it better, for me. Plenty of people are having celibate relationships now, you know. I read an article.”

Wrong answer. Recriminations, shouting, followed by the mother (father?) of all sulks. Believe me, no one knows how to sulk like a male academic with a bruised ego. By the end of it I’ve a) had sex with him (again! That’s the second time this month) and b) promised to go to the doctor to see if there’s anything that can be done.

Basically, it’s not enough that I do it occasionally. I have to enjoy it too.

The disloyal thought occurs to me that Simon would be perfectly happy with someone who faked it, so long as she faked it convincingly enough. Like that girl we used to call the Shrieker, who had the ground floor room at Bristol. After a year of keeping us awake with her screams of pleasure, she and her boyfriend split up. She confessed it had been a kind of method acting all along – if she gave a good enough performance, she was able to persuade herself she was getting something out of it.

Not that Simon would like me to shriek. That would be Distasteful. And Simon has very good taste. This is evidenced by the beautiful art on his walls, the beautiful clothes on his body, and the beautiful thoughts about the Nature of the Romantic Sublime in his head. (So heaven knows what he’s doing with me, since I’m clearly not in his league beauty-wise. Perhaps it’s just the forbidden thrill of seducing one of his students.)

Goodness, what a lot of disloyal thoughts seem to be spilling out. Maybe Susan’s right after all – this is actually quite therapeutic.

More later, then.

UrlGirl67

“When the only tool you have is a hammer,

you tend to treat every problem as if it’s a nail”

Anyway – to continue with the backstory – after we had the row I did what I usually do when confronted by a problem: I went on the internet. And, feeling faintly silly, typed in “female + can’t have orgasms + can’t seem to get excited about boyfriend + not sure if really fancy him”.

No exact matches, but removing the quotes and some extraneous words brought up 200,964,237 results. Mostly stuff that I don’t want to look at, thanks very much. So I added the magic words “peer-reviewed”.

And this strange little paper appeared. Or rather, three papers appeared, but two were about monkeys. The one that wasn’t was titled:

KXC79 and female sexual dysfunction: some encouraging early results.

Fisher, S.J and Minstock, S, 2007, Department of Molecular Biology, Oxford University.

In other words, just up the road. I’d never heard of an academic called Fisher, or one called Minstock, but arts and sciences tend not to mix much here, so that was hardly surprising.

There was a lot of science stuff I didn’t fully understand, even with the aid of a dictionary, but the gist of it seemed to be that they were working on a treatment for female sexual dysfunction that was going to be as straightforward as popping a pill. It wouldn’t be available on the open market for a while, because of the time it takes to get government approval, but reading between the lines they were pretty confident they’d cracked it.

Which started me thinking.

If I could solve all these problems with Simon, a little voice inside me was saying – if I could just take a pill and turn into the happy, orgasmic, randy little unit he so desperately wants me to be – wouldn’t that be nice?

Well, no, actually, another little voice was saying. Who wants to be Simon’s drugged-up sex puppet?

Ah, but that’s the Female Sexual Dysfunction talking, another voice pointed out. (And it was pretty impressive, incidentally, to suddenly have a proper medical label for what I thought was just a low sex drive. Not to mention a whole chorus of voices popping up in my head to talk about it.) It’s only because you have this problem in the first place that you aren’t keen on the drugged-up sex, the voice said (that’s the third voice, of course, not the second – try to keep up). Look at everyone else, at it like rabbits. That’s what’s normal.

In fact, the more me and my voices discussed it, the more we decided it was a pity I couldn’t give something like KXC79 a go.

I mentioned the article to Simon. I hadn’t meant to, actually, but he was getting grumpy again and I thought it might help if he knew that I had at least done a bit of research.

“Fisher,” he said thoughtfully. “Fisher... I do seem to remember some ghastly pointy-head of that name skulking round the place. Not the most likely person to have solved your little problem.”

(That is so typical of Simon, by the way – whilst he will happily tell you that he has an IQ of a hundred and fifty-eight and is therefore a near-genius, anyone who works in a different discipline is just a pointy-head.)

(And another thing I’ve noticed – he always talks about the discrepancy in our sex drives as being ‘“my” problem, not his. Of course, according to all the magazines, TV programmes, books and so on he’s right, so I suppose it must be me. It’s just that no one has ever really convinced me that sex isn’t, well, a waste of good reading time.)

(Since I seem to be complaining about Simon rather more than I meant to, let me just say for the record that of course I do love him. Not in the he-makes-my-heart-beat-faster-every-time-I-see-him sort of way – because, let’s face it, that doesn’t really happen, or at least not to me – but I know I’m so lucky to have him. He’s one of the cleverest, most amazing people I’ve ever met. And he’s going to be a professor soon. And –

And he’s my supervisor.

Which makes it rather hard for us to break up, actually, without causing a whole load of problems I’d rather do without. The Role Of The Mythical Feminine In The Idylls Of The King And Certain Other Poems By Tennyson is tedious enough already without having to explain it to a new supervisor who’d probably tell me to start again from scratch.

And after all, who wants to be single?

So basically, although I’m unlikely to end up as the next Mrs Frampton, this is fine.

For now.)

UrlGirl67

“When the only tool you have is a hammer,

you tend to treat every problem as if it’s a nail”

The funny thing was that although Simon had initially been sniffy about Dr Fisher and his “dodgy little pills”, as he called them, after he’d spoken to a couple of people in the Senior Common Room he came back quite excited. “Apparently the man’s on to something. He’s got backing from one of the big pharma companies – there’s a whole laboratory up on South Parks Road stuffed full of strange buzzing little machines. Porn, too. They have a special dispensation from the university to store some of the most filthy film clips ever made.” He paused significantly. “You never know, you might enjoy it.”

“Enjoy what?”

“Being part of his study.”

I stared at him. “What do you mean?”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? You can’t get these pills on the open market yet, but if you become one of his test subjects you’ll get them straight away.”

“What makes you think he’s recruiting test subjects?”

“Oh, it’s well known,” he said evasively. “Actually, I think I might have spotted an ad. Where was it? Ah yes.” And he handed me a copy of the Oxford Mail with a small ad circled in red pen.

“Are you sexually dysfunctional?” it said. “Female? Would you like to earn extra cash by helping out with medical research?” There was a phone number, and then, in smaller print, it said “Oxford University is an Equal Opportunities Employer”.

“Come on,” he said persuasively. “It might be fun.”

I shuddered. “Fun? Fun? Normal sex is depressing enough. Why on earth would I want to go and have my bits poked about with by some weirdo scientist?”

Another tactical error.

“Because you love me, of course,” he said stiffy.

And that was the beginning of Simon’s campaign to get me to ring the number on the ad. Although he was pretending to be matter-of-fact about it, the idea of me being wired up to all the machines he’d heard about and made to watch dirty movies was clearly exciting to him – almost as if he thought it would somehow jumpstart me into becoming more enthusiastic in bed.

So what with his nagging on the one hand, and a nagging feeling that I really ought to do something about this missing piece I seem to have on the other, I thought I should probably give it a go. But I still wouldn’t have done anything if I hadn’t met this girl at a party. She was telling me about her supervisor, who she described as “a total goof” – but she said it with a fond smile on her face, and I could tell she actually liked her goof quite a lot. Then she said his name.

“You work for Steven Fisher?” I said. “The sexual dysfunction man?”

“That’s right. He’s a bit of a genius, actually. You know he was the youngest scientist ever to win the Nicholas Kurti Award?”

I didn’t. Nor did I have the faintest idea what the Nicholas Kurti Award was, but I could tell it was something I should have been impressed by. The next day I phoned the number on the ad.

There was an initial interview with Susan, which I evidently passed, and then I had to come in for the first session. By this time it was seeming oddly normal to be discussing my orgasms, or rather the lack of them, with complete strangers, and I actually found myself becoming quite interested in what these people did. I mean, it’s all very well to find traces of vegetation myth in the poems of Tennyson, but this lot were actually discovering