I came across this recently. It confirms that there's a remarkable amount of individual and racial variation in regards to how people experience smell. And because the receptors used for smelling things are the same the body uses internally, differences in olfaction should tell us something about a person's biology and how they might react to various drugs.

Quote:There is an enormous diversity in the repertoire of functional odorant receptor genes among different people. Roughly 60% of human odor receptor genes have mutated into non-functional pseudogenes in a relatively recent genomic process... These and earlier findings suggest that differing evolutionary pressures may have shaped the chemosensory repertoire in different human populations. Additional variation in the population may come from differences in gene expression. Experiments with custom microarrays specialized for detecting odor receptor genes have found that the expressed receptor repertoires of any pair of individuals differ by at least 14% [12], suggesting that polymorphisms exist not only in coding regions but also in promoter and other regulatory regions (Figure 1).

...
GPCRs are estimated to account for some 50% of the targets for drugs in current use. As the odor receptors are GPCRs, the demonstration of polymorphic variation in their function by Keller et al. [5] provides strong support for the likelihood that polymorphic variation in other GPCRs has important effects on drug efficacy and side effects.

http://genomebiology.com/2007/8/11/230

Interesting.
I cant find the article, but i have read about an Australian medicine company who are in a stage where they test out a newly developed "Viagra" for women. It will come as a nose spray and will mostly consist of Testosterone. What they found is that smell of testosterone will turn a woman on almost instantly.
I cant find the article, so cant say much about it seriousity.

(12-22-2012 5:48 PM)Q-Tips Wrote:  Interesting.
I cant find the article, but i have read about an Australian medicine company who are in a stage where they test out a newly developed "Viagra" for women. It will come as a nose spray and will mostly consist of Testosterone. What they found is that smell of testosterone will turn a woman on almost instantly.
I cant find the article, so cant say much about it seriousity.

As I recall, this was simply intranasal delivery of testosterone. Not necessarily the smell of testosterone, but its rapid absorption is responsible for the effect on libido.

How keeping active pays off in the olfactory system

Although this is a technical representation, it accurately informs us about the essential role the development of olfactory receptor gene expression plays in our responses to novel odors, and why individual responses to odors vary with time and developmental staging. The bottom line is that "Olfaction and odor receptors provide a clear evolutionary trail that can be followed from unicellular organisms to insects to humans." -- the concluding sentence from my most recently published review article. If not for the individual variation, there would be no such thing as adaptive evolution across species. In essence, nutrient chemical-dependent pheromone-controlled reproduction is more important to survival of the species than anything else, no matter what species is discussed. That's what makes discussion of human pheromones important at all levels of discussion, not just in discussion of how to improve someone's sex life (not that there's anything wrong with that!)

(12-27-2012 8:22 PM)jvkohl Wrote:  As I recall, this was simply intranasal delivery of testosterone. Not necessarily the smell of testosterone, but its rapid absorption is responsible for the effect on libido.

Isn't some of the pheromone being absorbed in the nose by just smelling it? Albeit in much smaller amounts?