Bigger welcome!
Hello, San Francisco!
TEDx – oh my God, blinding light!
Hi, everybody!
How are you?
(Audience cheering) Fine?!
Oh my gosh!
Okay, so...
My name is Mel Robbins, and for the last seventeen years, I have done nothing but help people get everything that they want.
Within reason!
My husband's here.
So, I've done it in the courtroom, in the boardroom, in the bedroom, in people's living room, whatever room you want to be in, if I'm there, I will help you get whatever you want by any means necessary.
For the last three years – I host a syndicated radio show.
Five days a week, I go live in forty cities and I talk to men and women across America who feel stuck.
Do you know that a third of Americans feel dissatisfied with their lives right now?
That is a hundred million people!
That's insane!
And I've come face to face with it in this new show that I'm doing, which is also insane, it's called "In-laws".
I move in with families across America – (Laughter) You guessed it!
– who are at war with their in-laws.
We move them into the same house, I verbally assassinate everybody, we open up Pandora's box, and I get people to stop arguing about the donuts and who is hosting Thanksgiving dinner, and talk about the real stuff.
And that's what I want to talk to you about.
I'm here for you.
I'm going to tell you everything I know in less than eighteen minutes about how to get what you want.
So I want you to take a millisecond right now and think about what you want.
You!
And I want you to be selfish.
Screw Simon and the "We" thing.
This is about me, right now!
(Laughter) (Applause) Sorry, Simon.
What do you want?
And here's the deal.
I don't want it to sound good to other people.
Being healthy will not get your ass on a treadmill.
Losing your manboobs, so you can hook up with somebody, now that's motivation.
(Laughter) So, I want to know: What do you want?
Do you want to lose weight?
Do you want to triple your income?
Do you want to start a nonprofit?
Do you want to find love?
What is it?
Get it, right here.
You know what it is, don't analyze it to death, just pick something.
That's part of the problem.
You won't pick.
So, we're going to be talking about how you get what you want.
And frankly, getting what you want is simple.
But notice I didn't say it was easy.
It's very simple.
In fact, if you think about it, we live in the most amazing moment in time.
So that thing that you have up here, whatever it may be, you want to use healthy eating to cure your diabetes, you want to figure out how to take care of the elders and start a new hospice center, you want to move to Africa and build a school...
Guess what?
You can walk into a book store – right now! – and buy at least ten books written by credentialed experts on how the hell you do it.
You could Google it.
And you could probably find at least, I don't know - a thousand blogs documenting the step, by step, by step transformation that somebody else is already doing.
You can find anybody online and cyber-stalk them!
(Laughter) You can just walk in their footsteps – just use the science of drafting.
Follow what everyone else has done, because somebody is already doing it!
So why don't you have what you want, when you have all the information that you need, you have the contacts that you need, there are probably free tools online that allow you to start a business, or join a group, or do whatever the heck you want!?
It all comes down to one word: F*©#.
Shut the front door, you know what I'm talking about?
The f-bomb.
It's everywhere!
You hear it all the time!
I honestly don't understand what the appeal is of the word.
I mean, you don't sound smart when you say it.
And it's really not expressing how you really feel.
It's sort of a cheap shot to take.
And of course you know I'm talking about the word "fine".
"How you doing?"
"Oh, I'm fine."
Oh, really?
You are?
Dragging around those extra forty pounds, you're fine?
Feeling like roommates with your spouse, and you're fine?
You haven't had sex in four months, you're fine?
Really?!
I don't think so!
But see, here's the deal with saying that you're fine: It's actually genius.
Because if you're fine, you don't have to do anything about it.
But when you think about this word "fine", it just makes me so angry.
Here we are at a conference about being alive and you're going to describe the experience of being alive as "fine"?!
What a flimsy and feeble word!
If you're crappy, say you're crappy!
If you're amazing say you're amazing!
Tell the truth!
And this not only goes for the social construct: "Oh, I don't want to burden you with the fact that I hate my life", or: "Hey, I'm amazing!
But that would make you feel terrible."
The bigger issue – The bigger issue with "fine" is that you say it to yourself.
That thing that you want, I guarantee you, you've convinced yourself that you're fine not having it.
That's why you're not pushing yourself.
It's the areas in your life where you've given up.
Where you've said, "Oh, I'm fine.
My mom's never going to change, so I just can't have that conversation."
"I'm fine.
We've got to wait until the kids graduate, before we get divorced, so we'll just sleep in separate bedrooms."
"I'm fine.
I lost my job, I can barely pay my bills, but whatever – It's hard to get a job."
One of the reasons why this word also just annoys me so much is, scientists have calculated – Oh yeah, I'm coming down!
(Laughter) Scientists have calculated the odds of you being born.
That's right.
They've crunched the numbers.
I see you up there.
They've crunched the numbers on you – Yeah, you guys standing up, you want to sit down for this.
They've crunched the numbers on you being born.
And they took into account all of the wars, and the natural disasters, and the dinosaurs, and everything else.
And do you realize that the odds, the odds of you, yeah, right here, put your computer away, stand up for me, Doug!
(Laughter) So the odds of Doug here, turn around, say "hi" to everybody – the odds of Doug being born at the moment in time he was born, to the parents you were born to, with the DNA structure that you have, one in four hundred trillion!
Isn't that amazing?
Doug: I'm so lucky!
Mel: Yes!
You're not fine, you're fantastic!
You have life-changing ideas for a reason, and it's not to torture yourself.
Thank you.
Thank you, Doug.
(Applause) Christine was right when she said all of you could be on stage.
Because all of you – we're all in this category.
One in four hundred trillion.
All day long you have ideas that could change your life, that could change the world, that could change the way that you feel, and what do you do with them?
Nothing!
(Grunts) Hopefully I won't moon you.
(Laughter) You didn't pay for that.
(Laughter) And I want you to just think for a minute, because we all have – I love to use the analogy "the inner snooze button" – you have these amazing ideas that bubble up.
You've been watching people all day and I guarantee you, like ping pong balls – bam-bam-bam and everytime you have an idea, what do you do? – Hit the snooze!
What's the first decision you made this morning?
I bet it was to go back to bed.
"Yeah, first decision today, I'm one in four hundred trillion, I'm going to go back to sleep."
And I get it!
Your bed is comfortable!
It's cosy, it's warm!
If you're lucky, you've got somebody that you love next to you, or in my case, I've got my husband and my two kids and possibly the dog.
And the reason why I'm bringing up this first decision that you made today, and the inner snooze alarm, is because in any area of your life that you want to change, any – there's one fact that you need to know.
This one: You are never going to feel like it.
Ever.
No one's coming, motivation isn't happening, you're never going to feel like it.
Scientists call it activation energy.
That's what they call the force required to get you to change from what you're doing on autopilot to do something new.
So try this test tomorrow.
You think you're so fancy, I know, you're attending TED.
(Laughter) Try this.
Tomorrow morning, set your alarm for thirty minutes earlier.
And then when it goes off, take those sheets, throw them off, and stand up and start your day.
No snooze, no delay, no, "I'll just wait here for five seconds because Mel's not standing here" – Do it.
And the reason why I want you to do it is because you will come face to face with the physical, and I mean physical force that's required to change your behavior.
Do you think that somebody who needs to lose weight ever feels like going on a diet?
Of course not!
You think they ever feel like eating boiled chicken and peas instead of a croissant?
I don't think so!
The activation energy required to get your ass away from your computer and out the front door, to go on the walk, you said that you were going to go on, is the exact same amount of force that it takes you to push yourself out of a warm bed and into a cold room.
What's interesting about being an adult is that when you become eighteen, nobody tells you that it's now going to be your job to parent yourself.
And by "parent yourself", I mean it's your job to make yourself do the crap you don't want to do, so you can be everything that you're supposed to be.
And you're so damn busy waiting to feel like it.
And you're never going to!
My son never feels like getting off his DS.
That's my job!
Get off the damn DS!
Kendall, clean up the Barbies!
If you're going to have a nude party in my bathroom, at least clean it up!
(Laughter) God, chew with your mouth closed!
We're not a barn, for crying out loud!
Alright, dinner is coming, get out of the pantry.
As parents, and you were a kid, your parents make you do the things you don't feel like doing.
Because you won't.
Ever.
Not now, not then, not ever!
And even when you get good at something, you'll figure out something else you don't want to do.
And then you'll plateau out, get bored, "I hate this job.
Blah blah boring."
But will you look for a new one?
No!
You'll just bitch about that one.
It's very, very simple to get what you want.
But it's not easy.
You have to force yourself.
And I mean force.
And the reason why I use the word "force" – when Roz was up here and talking about the emotion tracking, and she had the picture of two sides of the brain – I look at the brain the exact same way.
Only I describe one side of your brain as autopilot and the other side as emergency brake.
That's the only two speeds you get: autopilot, emergency brake.
And guess which one your brain likes better: autopilot.
You've had the experience where you've driven to work and you get there and you're like, "Oh my God, I don't remember ever driving here."
(Laughter) You weren't drunk!
That was your brain on autopilot.
It was functioning just at this level.
And the problem with your mind is that anytime you do anything that's different from your normal routine, guess what your brain does — emergency brake!
And it has that reaction for everything.
Everything!
You walk into the kitchen and see everybody's left their breakfast dishes for you.
And you think for the hundredth time, "I'm going to kill them.
In fact I'm gonna leave it here and I'm going to make them do it."
But that's not your normal routine, is it?
So your mind goes: emergency brake!
And you go right into autopilot.
"I'll just load it, and be pissed, and then not have sex.
That's what I'm going to do."
(Laughter) (Applause) So, when I say "force", anything that's a break from your routine is going to require force.
And if you think about your life, it's kind of funny because we are kids and then we become adults, and we spend so much time trying to push our life into some sort of stable routine, and then we grow bored of it!
You wake up at the same time every day, you have largely the same breakfast, you drive to work the same way, show up at work, look busy, avoid making calls, update Facebook, you attend a meeting and doodle the whole time, go back and update Facebook, make plans for the evening, you look busy some more, then drive home the same way, you eat largely the same dinner or a variety of it, you watch the same kind of media, and then you go to bed, and do the same thing all over again!
No wonder you're bored out of your mind!
It's the routine that's killing you.
I have this theory about why people get stuck in life.
So, most of you've probably taken your Basic Psych 101 class, and you've bumped into Abraham Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs"?
Well, your body is kinda cool.
Because you have these basic needs.
And your body is wired to send you signals.
If you need food, what do you feel?
If you need water, what do you feel?
If you need sex, what do you feel?
(Laughter) Thank you.
I think when you feel stuck or dissatisfied in your life, it's a signal.
And it's not a signal that your life is broken.
It's a signal that one of your most basic needs are not being met.
Your need for exploration.
Everything about your life, about your body, grows!
Your cells regenerate, your hair, your nails, everything grows for your entire life.
And your soul needs exploration and growth.
And the only way you'll get it is by forcing yourself to be uncomfortable.
Forcing yourself to get outside, out of your head.
Thank you.
If you're in your head, you're behind enemy lines.
That is not God talking, okay?
It's not!
In fact, if I put a speaker on it and we broadcast what you say to yourself, we would institutionalize you.
(Laughter) You would not hang out with people that talk to you the way you talk to yourself.
So get out of your head!
Your feelings!
Your feelings are screwing you!
I don't care how you feel!
I care about what you want!
And if you listen to how you feel, when it comes to what you want – you will not get it.
Because you will never feel like it.
And you need to get outside your comfort zone.
It's not about taking risks, it's about getting outside your comfort zone.
Those first three seconds when you push yourself out of bed, they blow.
But once you're up, it's great.
Those first three seconds when you're sitting here in a stadium like this and somebody says, "Get up and come dance," and you think, "Oh, I should do that," and then you're like, "Uhmm."
That experience that you had when you had the impulse to do it and then you didn't do the activation energy required to force yourself, your emergency brake got pulled – "I'm sitting right here.
I'm not going up with those crazy people, I don't like to dance..."
What happened for me is I came up, and I bumped into Rachel, and then we started talking, and next thing you know, she's tweeting.
And we're friends.
And – boom!
Get outside.
That's where the magic is.
That's where the one in four hundred trillion exists.
So everything I do – oh, OK, this is the last part.
Sorry.
So one more thing that you can use, I call it the five-second-rule.
Your mind can process a facial expression in 33 milliseconds.
It can move pretty damn quick.
The other thing that it does very quickly is if you have one of those little impulses that are pulling you, if you don't marry it with an action within five seconds, you pull the emergency brake and kill the idea.
Kill it!
If you have the impulse to get up and come dance while the band is playing, if you don't stand up in five seconds, you're going to pull the emergency brake.
If you have an impulse about, you were inspired by somebody's speech today, and you don't do something within five seconds – write a note, send yourself a text – anything physical to marry it with the idea, you will pull the emergency brake and kill the idea.
Your problem isn't ideas.
Your problem is you don't act on them.
You kill them.
It's not my fault.
It's not anybody's fault.
You're doing it to yourself.
Stop it!
I'm counting on you.
One in four hundred trillion.
You got stuff to do!
And it's not going to happen in your head.
So I want you to practice this today.
When we go off to party, thank God it's coming soon, because I think we all could use a cocktail, I want you to practice the five-second-rule.
You see somebody and you think you have an impulse, they look interesting?
Walk over there!
You were inspired by somebody and you have a request?
Make it!
That's why you're here!
Experiment with it, and I think you'll be shocked about what happens.
And one more thing, I want you to know that everything that I do, whether it's the radio show, or the television show, or the book that I wrote, or the column, it's for you.
And if there is anything that I can do, if I can do anything to make you do the things you don't want to do, so you can have what you want, I will do it.
But you need to walk over, you need to open your mouth, and you need to make the request.
You got it?
Good.
Go do it.
(Applause) Thank you!
Thank you, yes!
Stand up!
You have the impulse, stand up!
Thank you!
15 years ago, I volunteered to participate in a research study that involved a genetic test.
When I arrived at the clinic to be tested, I was handed a questionnaire.
One of the very first questions asked me to check a box for my race: White, black, Asian, or Native American.
I wasn't quite sure how to answer the question.
Was it aimed at measuring the diversity of research participants' social backgrounds?
In that case, I would answer with my social identity, and check the box for "black."
But what if the researchers were interested in investigating some association between ancestry and the risk for certain genetic traits?
In that case, wouldn't they want to know something about my ancestry, which is just as much European as African?
And how could they make scientific findings about my genes if I put down my social identity as a black woman?
After all, I consider myself a black woman with a white father rather than a white woman with a black mother entirely for social reasons.
Which racial identity I check has nothing to do with my genes.
Well, despite the obvious importance of this question to the study's scientific validity, I was told, "Don't worry about it, just put down however you identify yourself."
So I check "black," but I had no confidence in the results of a study that treated a critical variable so unscientifically.
That personal experience with the use of race in genetic testing got me thinking: Where else in medicine is race used to make false biological predictions?
Well, I found out that race runs deeply throughout all of medical practice.
It shapes physicians' diagnoses, measurements, treatments, prescriptions, even the very definition of diseases.
And the more I found out, the more disturbed I became.
Sociologists like me have long explained that race is a social construction.
When we identify people as black, white, Asian, Native American, Latina, we're referring to social groupings with made up demarcations that have changed over time and vary around the world.
As a legal scholar, I've also studied how lawmakers, not biologists, have invented the legal definitions of races.
And it's not just the view of social scientists.
You remember when the map of the human genome was unveiled at a White House ceremony in June 2000?
President Bill Clinton famously declared, "I believe one of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome is that in genetic terms, human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same."
And he might have added that that less than one percent of genetic difference doesn't fall into racial boxes.
Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project and now heads NIH, echoed President Clinton.
"I am happy that today, the only race we're talking about is the human race."
Doctors are supposed to practice evidence-based medicine, and they're increasingly called to join the genomic revolution.
But their habit of treating patients by race lags far behind.
Take the estimate of glomerular filtration rate, or GFR.
Doctors routinely interpret GFR, this important indicator of kidney function, by race.
As you can see in this lab test, the exact same creatinine level, the concentration in the blood of the patient, automatically produces a different GFR estimate depending on whether or not the patient is African-American.
Why?
I've been told it's based on an assumption that African-Americans have more muscle mass than people of other races.
But what sense does it make for a doctor to automatically assume I have more muscle mass than that female bodybuilder?
Wouldn't it be far more accurate and evidence-based to determine the muscle mass of individual patients just by looking at them?
Well, doctors tell me they're using race as a shortcut.
It's a crude but convenient proxy for more important factors, like muscle mass, enzyme level, genetic traits they just don't have time to look for.
But race is a bad proxy.
In many cases, race adds no relevant cgeorge@example.com.
It's just a distraction.
But race also tends to overwhelm the clinical measures.
It blinds doctors to patients' symptoms, family illnesses, their history, their own illnesses they might have -- all more evidence-based than the patient's race.
Race can't substitute for these important clinical measures without sacrificing patient well-being.
Doctors also tell me race is just one of many factors they take into account, but there are numerous medical tests, like the GFR, that use race categorically to treat black, white, Asian patients differently just because of their race.
Race medicine also leaves patients of color especially vulnerable to harmful biases and stereotypes.
Black and Latino patients are twice as likely to receive no pain medication as whites for the same painful long bone fractures because of stereotypes that black and brown people feel less pain, exaggerate their pain, and are predisposed to drug addiction.
The Food and Drug Administration has even approved a race-specific medicine.
It's a pill called BiDil to treat heart failure in self-identified African-American patients.
A cardiologist developed this drug without regard to race or genetics, but it became convenient for commercial reasons to market the drug to black patients.
The FDA then allowed the company, the drug company, to test the efficacy in a clinical trial that only included African-American subjects.
It speculated that race stood in as a proxy for some unknown genetic factor that affects heart disease or response to drugs.
But think about the dangerous message it sent, that black people's bodies are so substandard, a drug tested in them is not guaranteed to work in other patients.
In the end, the drug company's marketing scheme failed.
For one thing, black patients were understandably wary of using a drug just for black people.
One elderly black woman stood up in a community meeting and shouted, "Give me what the white people are taking!"
(Laughter) And if you find race-specific medicine surprising, wait until you learn that many doctors in the United States still use an updated version of a diagnostic tool that was developed by a physician during the slavery era, a diagnostic tool that is tightly linked to justifications for slavery.
Dr. Samuel Cartwright graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School.
He practiced in the Deep South before the Civil War, and he was a well-known expert on what was then called "Negro medicine."
He promoted the racial concept of disease, that people of different races suffer from different diseases and experience common diseases differently.
Cartwright argued in the 1850s that slavery was beneficial for black people for medical reasons.
He claimed that because black people have lower lung capacity than whites, forced labor was good for them.
He wrote in a medical journal, "It is the red vital blood sent to the brain that liberates their minds when under the white man's control, and it is the want of sufficiency of red vital blood that chains their minds to ignorance and barbarism when in freedom."
To support this theory, Cartwright helped to perfect a medical device for measuring breathing called the spirometer to show the presumed deficiency in black people's lungs.
Today, doctors still uphold Cartwright's claim the black people as a race have lower lung capacity than white people.
Some even use a modern day spirometer that actually has a button labeled "race" so the machine adjusts the measurement for each patient according to his or her race.
It's a well-known function called "correcting for race."
The problem with race medicine extends far beyond misdiagnosing patients.
Its focus on innate racial differences in disease diverts attention and resources from the social determinants that cause appalling racial gaps in health: lack of access to high-quality medical care; food deserts in poor neighborhoods; exposure to environmental toxins; high rates of incarceration; and experiencing the stress of racial discrimination.
You see, race is not a biological category that naturally produces these health disparities because of genetic difference.
Race is a social category that has staggering biological consequences, but because of the impact of social inequality on people's health.
Yet race medicine pretends the answer to these gaps in health can be found in a race-specific pill.
It's much easier and more lucrative to market a technological fix for these gaps in health than to deal with the structural inequities that produce them.
The reason I'm so passionate about ending race medicine isn't just because it's bad medicine.
I'm also on this mission because the way doctors practice medicine continues to promote a false and toxic view of humanity.
Despite the many visionary breakthroughs in medicine we've been learning about, there's a failure of imagination when it comes to race.
Would you imagine with me, just a moment: What would happen if doctors stopped treating patients by race?
Suppose they rejected an 18th-century classification system and incorporated instead the most advanced knowledge of human genetic diversity and unity, that human beings cannot be categorized into biological races?
What if, instead of using race as a crude proxy for some more important factor, doctors actually investigated and addressed that more important factor?
What if doctors joined the forefront of a movement to end the structural inequities caused by racism, not by genetic difference?
Race medicine is bad medicine, it's poor science and it's a false interpretation of humanity.
It is more urgent than ever to finally abandon this backward legacy and to affirm our common humanity by ending the social inequalities that truly divide us.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you.
"Pheromone" is a very powerful word.
It conjures up sex, abandon, loss of control, and you can see, it's very important as a word.
But it's only 50 years old.
It was invented in 1959.
Now, if you put that word into the web, as you may have done, you'll come up with millions of hits, and almost all of those sites are trying to sell you something to make you irresistible for 10 dollars or more.
Now, this is a very attractive idea, and the molecules they mention sound really science-y.
They've got lots of syllables.
It's things like androstenol, androstenone or androstadienone.
It gets better and better, and when you combine that with white lab coats, you must imagine that there is fantastic science behind this.
But sadly, these are fraudulent claims supported by dodgy science.
The problem is that, although there are many good scientists working on what they think are human pheromones, and they're publishing in respectable journals, at the basis of this, despite very sophisticated experiments, there really is no good science behind it, because it's based on a problem, which is nobody has systematically gone through all the odors that humans produce -- and there are thousands of molecules that we give off.
We're mammals.
We produce a lot of smell.
Nobody has gone through systematically to work out which molecules really are pheromones.
They've just plucked a few, and all these experiments are based on those, but there's no good cgeorge@example.com.
Now, that's not to say that smell is not important to people.
It is, and some people are real enthusiasts, and one of these was Napoleon.
And famously, you may remember that out on the campaign trail for war, he wrote to his lover, Empress Josephine, saying, "Don't wash.
I'm coming home."
(Laughter) So he didn't want to lose any of her richness in the days before he'd get home, and it is still, you'll find websites that offer this as a major quirk.
At the same time, though, we spend about as much money taking the smells off us as putting them back on in perfumes, and perfumes are a multi-billion-dollar business.
So what I want to do in the rest of this talk is tell you about what pheromones really are, tell you why I think we would expect humans to have pheromones, tell you about some of the confusions in pheromones, and then finally, I want to end with a promising avenue which shows us the way we ought to be going.
So the ancient Greeks knew that dogs sent invisible signals between each other.
A female dog in heat sent an invisible signal to male dogs for miles around, and it wasn't a sound, it was a smell.
You could take the smell from the female dog, and the dogs would chase the cloth.
But the problem for everybody who could see this effect was that you couldn't identify the molecules.
You couldn't demonstrate it was chemical.
The reason for that, of course, is that each of these animals produces tiny quantities, and in the case of the dog, males dogs can smell it, but we can't smell it.
And it was only in 1959 that a German team, after spending 20 years in search of these molecules, discovered, identified, the first pheromone, and this was the sex pheromone of a silk moth.
Now, this was an inspired choice by Adolf Butenandt and his team, because he needed half a million moths to get enough material to do the chemical analysis.
But he created the model for how you should go about pheromone analysis.
He basically went through systematically, showing that only the molecule in question was the one that stimulated the males, not all the others.
He analyzed it very carefully.
He synthesized the molecule, and then tried the synthesized molecule on the males and got them to respond and showed it was, indeed, that molecule.
That's closing the circle.
That's the thing which has never been done with humans: nothing systematic, no real demonstration.
With that new concept, we needed a new word, and that was the word "pheromone," and it's basically transferred excitement, transferred between individuals, and since 1959, pheromones have been found right the way across the animal kingdom, in male animals, in female animals.
It works just as well underwater for goldfish and lobsters.
And almost every mammal you can think of has had a pheromone identified, and of course, an enormous number of insects.
So we know that pheromones exist right the way across the animal kingdom.
What about humans?
Well, the first thing, of course, is that we're mammals, and mammals are smelly.
As any dog owner can tell you, we smell, they smell.
But the real reason we might think that humans have pheromones is the change that occurs as we grow up.
The smell of a room of teenagers is quite different from the smell of a room of small children.
What's changed?
And of course, it's puberty.
Along with the pubic hair and the hair in the armpits, new glands start to secrete in those places, and that's what's making the change in smell.
If we were any other kind of mammal, or any other kind of animal, we would say, "That must be something to do with pheromones," and we'd start looking properly.
But there are some problems, and this is why, I think, people have not looked for pheromones so effectively in humans.
There are, indeed, problems.
And the first of these is perhaps surprising.
It's all about culture.
Now moths don't learn a lot about what is good to smell, but humans do, and up to the age of about four, any smell, no matter how rancid, is simply interesting.
And I understand that the major role of parents is to stop kids putting their fingers in poo, because it's always something nice to smell.
But gradually we learn what's not good, and one of the things we learn at the same time as what is not good is what is good.
Now, the cheese behind me is a British, if not an English, delicacy.
It's ripe blue Stilton.
Liking it is incomprehensible to people from other countries.
Every culture has its own special food and national delicacy.
If you were to come from Iceland, your national dish is deep rotted shark.
Now, all of these things are acquired tastes, but they form almost a badge of identity.
You're part of the in-group.
The second thing is the sense of smell.
Each of us has a unique odor world, in the sense that what we smell, we each smell a completely different world.
Now, smell was the hardest of the senses to crack, and the Nobel Prize awarded to Richard Axel and Linda Buck was only awarded in 2004 for their discovery of how smell works.
It's really hard, but in essence, nerves from the brain go up into the nose and on these nerves exposed in the nose to the outside air are receptors, and odor molecules coming in on a sniff interact with these receptors, and if they bond, they send the nerve a signal which goes back into the brain.
We don't just have one kind of receptor.
If you're a human, you have about 400 different kinds of receptors, and the brain knows what you're smelling because of the combination of receptors and nerve cells that they trigger, sending messages up to the brain in a combinatorial fashion.
But it's a bit more complicated, because each of those 400 comes in various variants, and depending which variant you have, you might smell coriander, or cilantro, that herb, either as something delicious and savory or something like soap.
So we each have an individual world of smell, and that complicates anything when we're studying smell.
Well, we really ought to talk about armpits, and I have to say that I do have particularly good ones.
Now, I'm not going to share them with you, but this is the place that most people have looked for pheromones.
There is one good reason, which is, the great apes have armpits as their unique characteristic.
The other primates have scent glands in other parts of the body.
The great apes have these armpits full of secretory glands producing smells all the time, enormous numbers of molecules.
When they're secreted from the glands, the molecules are odorless.
They have no smell at all, and it's only the wonderful bacteria growing on the rainforest of hair that actually produces the smells that we know and love.
And so incidentally, if you want to reduce the amount of smell, clear-cutting your armpits is a very effective way of reducing the habitat for bacteria, and you'll find they remain less smelly for much longer.
But although we've focused on armpits, I think it's partly because they're the least embarrassing place to go and ask people for samples.
There is actually another reason why we might not be looking for a universal sex pheromone there, and that's because 20 percent of the world's population doesn't have smelly armpits like me.
And these are people from China, Japan, Korea, and other parts of northeast Asia.
They simply don't secrete those odorless precursors that the bacteria love to use to produce the smells that in an ethnocentric way we always thought of as characteristic of armpits.
So it doesn't apply to 20 percent of the world.
So what should we be doing in our search for human pheromones?
I'm fairly convinced that we do have them.
We're mammals, like everybody else who's a mammal, and we probably do have them.
But what I think we should do is go right back to the beginning, and basically look all over the body.
No matter how embarrassing, we need to search and go for the first time where no one else has dared tread.
It's going to be difficult, it's going to be embarrassing, but we need to look.
We also need to go back to the ideas that Butenandt used when he was studying the silk moth.
We need to go back and look systematically at all the molecules that are being produced, and work out which ones are really involved.
It isn't good enough simply to pluck a couple and say, "They'll do."
We have to actually demonstrate that they really have the effects we claim.
There is one team that I'm actually very impressed by.
They're in France, and their previous success was identifying the rabbit mammary pheromone.
They've turned their attention now to human babies and mothers.
So this is a baby having a drink of milk from its mother's breast.
Her nipple is completely hidden by the baby's head, but what you'll notice is a white droplet with an arrow pointing to it, and that's the secretion from the areolar glands.
Now, we all have them, men and women, and these are the little bumps around the nipple, and if you're a lactating woman, these start to secrete.
It's a very interesting secretion.
What Benoist Schaal and his team developed was a simple test to investigate what the effect of this secretion might be, in effect, a simple bioassay.
So this is a sleeping baby, and under its nose, we've put a clean glass rod.
The baby remains sleeping, showing no cgeorge@example.com.
But if we go to any mother who is secreting from the areolar glands, so it's not about recognition, it can be from any mother, if we take the secretion and now put it under the baby's nose, we get a very different reaction.
It's a connoisseur's reaction of delight, and it opens its mouth and sticks out its tongue and starts to suck.
Now, since this is from any mother, it could really be a pheromone.
It's not about individual recognition.
Any mother will do.
Now, why is this important, apart from being simply very interesting?
It's because women vary in the number of areolar glands that they have, and there is a correlation between the ease with which babies start to suckle and the number of areolar glands she has.
It appears that the more secretions she's got, the more likely the baby is to suckle quickly.
If you're a mammal, the most dangerous time in life is the first few hours after birth.
You have to get that first drink of milk, and if you don't get it, you won't survive.
You'll be dead.
Since many babies actually find it difficult to take that first meal, because they're not getting the right stimulus, if we could identify what that molecule was, and the French team are being very cautious, but if we could identify the molecule, synthesize it, it would then mean premature babies would be more likely to suckle, and every baby would have a better chance of survival.
So what I want to argue is this is one example of where a systematic, really scientific approach can actually bring you a real understanding of pheromones.
There could be all sorts of medical interventions.
There could be all sorts of things that humans are doing with pheromones that we simply don't know at the moment.
What we need to remember is pheromones are not just about sex.
They're about all sorts of things to do with a mammal's life.
So do go forward and do search for more.
There's lots to find.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)