Honeymoon in a Bottle

Remember how we said we wanted to bottle that honeymoon feeling and sell it? Someone beat you to it. From Reuters: Could we reduce love to a pill? Maybe, says expert:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Could a pill or a squirt up your nose save your marriage? Maybe, according to a researcher who is studying the chemical basis of that most elusive of emotions -- love.

Larry Young says his ultimate quest is not a high-tech love potion but to shed light on serious conditions like autism, which affects the ability to form social attachments, by studying brain chemicals involved in emotional attachment.

"Biologists may soon be able to reduce certain mental states associated with love to a biochemical chain of events," Young, of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta, wrote in the journal Nature.

"It's a chemical reaction. At least in voles we know that if you take a female and place her with a male and infuse her brain with oxytocin, she will quickly bond with that male," he said in a telephone interview.

Taking away her natural levels of oxytocin -- a hormone involved in labor, nursing and social bonding -- means she will reject a male as a mate no matter how many times she physically copulates with him.

"Experiments have shown that a nasal squirt of oxytocin enhances trust and tunes people into others' emotions," Young wrote in the Nature article.

"Internet entrepreneurs are already marketing products such as Enhanced Liquid Trust, a cologne-like mixture of oxytocin and pheromones designed to boost the dating and relationship area of your life," he wrote.

Wow. That's a dangerous ability if it were to fall in the wrong hands. I bet sales of oxytocin colognes are skyrocketing right now.