Grasshoppers are stocky rodents and Olympic borers that come out into grassy areas to feast on grass, roots and seeds with their chisel-shaped teeth, giving farmers and gardeners migraines.
But for Larry Young, it was the secret to understanding romance and love.
Professor Young, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta, used meadows in a series of experiments that revealed the chemical process for pirouetting the poignant emotions that poets have tried to put into words for centuries.
He died on March 21 in Tsukuba, Japan, where he was helping to organize a scientific conference. He was 56. The cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Anne Murphy.
With their shiny eyes, bushy tails and sharp claws, prairie dogs aren’t exactly cuddly. But among rodents, they are uniquely domestic: They are monogamous, and males and females form a family unit to raise their offspring together.
“The prairie voles, if you take away their mate, they show depression-like behavior,” Professor Young told The Atlanta-Journal Constitution in 2009. “It’s almost like there’s withdrawal from their mate.”
This made them ideal for laboratory studies examining the chemistry of love.
In a study Published in 1999, Professor Young and colleagues exploited the gene in meadows associated with the signaling of vasopressin, a hormone that regulates social behavior. They enhanced vasopressin signaling in mice, which are highly promiscuous.
The headline writers had fun. “Gene swapping turns mice into devoted companions,” said the Ottawa Citizen. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram: “Genetic science makes mice more romantic.” The Independent in London: “The ‘perfect man’ gene discovered”.
Professor Young followed up with other meadow studies that focused on oxytocin, a hormone that stimulates contractions during labor and is involved in bonding between mothers and newborns.
“Because we knew oxytocin was involved in mother-infant bonding, we investigated whether oxytocin might be involved in this partner bonding,” he said in an interview with Australian broadcaster in 2019.
It was.
“If you take two prairie voles, a male and a female, put them together and this time you don’t let them mate and you just give them some oxytocin, they’ll bond,” Professor Young said. “So this was our first set of experiments to show that oxytocin is involved in things other than maternal bonding.”
He also injected female prairie voles with a drug that blocks oxytocin, which made them temporarily polygamous.
“Love doesn’t really fly in and out,” Professor Young wrote “The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex, and the Science of Attraction” (2012, with Brian Alexander). “The complex behaviors surrounding these emotions are driven by a few molecules in our brain. It is these molecules, acting on specific neural circuits, that so powerfully influence some of the biggest and most important decisions we will ever make.”
Professor Young always warned that the prairies were not people (obviously). But in the same way that mouse studies led to medical breakthroughs, he thought his research with prairie voles had interesting implications.
“Perhaps someday genetic tests for the suitability of potential mates will become available, the results of which could accompany, or even override, our instincts in choosing the perfect mate,” Professor Young wrote in Nature. He added, “Drugs that manipulate brain systems to enhance or diminish our love for another may not be far off.”
In recent years, Professor Young has been investigating whether increasing oxytocin in certain conditions would help children with autism who struggle with social interactions.
Larry James Young was born on June 16, 1967 in Sylvester, a rural town in southwest Georgia. His father, James Young, and his mother, Margaret (Gindens) Young, were peanut farmers.
As a child he had a cow named Bessie.
“It was a really rural lifestyle,” Ms Murphy said. “His ambition was to go work at the gas station down the road and become a manager.”
He attended the University of Georgia on a Pell grant with plans to become a veterinarian. One day, in biochemistry class, he cut a fruit fly.
“And that’s when he fell in love with genetics and just wanted to understand the genetic basis of behavior,” Ms Murphy said. “That’s what drove him the rest of his life.”
After graduating in 1989 with a degree in biochemistry, he received a Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1994, and then took a postdoctoral position at Emory. He never left the university, eventually becoming head of the department of behavioral neuroscience and psychiatric disorders at Emory National Primate Research Center.
Professor Young married Michelle Willingham in 1985. They later divorced. He married Ms. Murphy in 2002. He is a neuroscientist at Georgia State University in Atlanta.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by three daughters from his first marriage, Leigh Anna, Olivia and Savannah Young. two stepsons, Jack and Sam Murphy; a brother, Terry Young; and two sisters, Marcia Young-Whitacre and Robyn Hicks.
Around the Emory campus, Professor Young was also known as the Love Doctor. He was popular on Valentine’s Day — not just with Mrs. Murphy. Journalists the world over would ask him to explain the chemistry of romance.
One day, he said, there might even be a drug that would increase the desire to fall in love.
“It would be completely unethical to give the drug to someone else,” he told the New York Times, “but if you’re in a marriage and you want to maintain that relationship, you might get a little booster shot every now and then. .”