Fred and George, friends of Harry Potter who sell love potions in Half-Blood Prince to girls at Hogwarts school

New Delhi, Jan. 8: Science may be closing in on 21st century versions of love potions.

Studies exploring the biology of love — specifically, the mechanisms of pair bonding — have provided peepholes into the biochemistry of human emotions and raised the prospect of drugs that may dictate feelings of love.

Scientists may soon be able to explain love through a biochemical chain of events, a leading US researcher investigating the molecular mechanisms of social behaviour in animals said in a report published today in the journal Nature.

“Drugs that manipulate brain systems... to enhance or diminish our love for another may not be far away,” Larry Young, the principal investigator at the Yerkes National Primate Research Centre at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, has predicted.

Young has cited recent findings of studies from his own laboratory and from Europe that represent attempts to decipher the chemistry and the genetics of pair bonding in animals and humans.

In November, a research team led by psychologist Beate Ditzen at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, showed that a nasal spray of a hormone called oxytocin improved interactions between couples involved in staged fights.

The Zurich scientists videotaped the verbal and non-verbal interactions between couples asked to discuss an issue of conflict between them. The administration of oxytocin — just before the start of the conflict discussion — increased the duration of their positive behaviour towards one another in relation to negative behaviour. The study findings appear in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

But scientists cautioned that there is still uncertainty over whether doctors would actually prescribe such emotion-altering pills or even whether people would queue up to have their feelings manipulated via chemicals.

“We will go on doing research on the chemistry of couple interactions, but we are far away from using it for the treatment of couples instead of offering them (standard) psychological intervention,” Ditzen told The Telegraph in an interview.

The concept, she said, might also kick up debates on the ethics of altering feelings or unhappiness between couples. “The phenomenon of unhappy couples cannot really be seen as a medical disorder,” she said. “These substances might help us evaluate the effects of standard treatment such as behavioural therapy — they probably will not replace standard treatment,” Ditzen said.

A study by American and Swedish scientists has also provided fresh insights into the biochemistry of pair bonding by showing how one version of a gene called AVPR1A appears to influence how human males bond with their partners.

The Penn State University and Sweden’s Karolinska Institute researchers found that men with two copies of a version of the gene were twice as likely to report serious marital or relationship problems as men who did not have this variant.

“We found that female partners of men with one or two copies (of this version) reported less affection, consensus and cohesion in the marriage but, interestingly, did not report lower levels of marital satisfaction than women whose male partners had no copies,” said Jenae Neiderhiser, a psychologist at Penn State and the lead author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in September.

Researchers caution that the findings do not suggest that genetic tests could be used to predict a person’s pair bonding potential.

But they suggest that the mechanisms involved in pair bonding observed in certain rodents also apply in humans.

In his perspective essay in Nature, Emory University’s Young has predicted that given the recent advances in this field, “it won’t be long before an unscrupulous suitor could slip a pharmaceutical love potion in our drink”.

If his prediction comes true, aspirants in love may soon be able to switch from chocolates and strawberries to potions rooted in biology.

Young and his colleagues had shown through studies on a species of rodents called meadow voles four years ago that transferring a single gene for a specific molecule into the brain’s reward centre can turn promiscuous males monogamous.