Chapter 19: An irresistible chemical assault

Over the next several hours, with brief breaks only for food (once) and sex (twice), I was to learn more about human physiology and neurology than I had in the previous forty-nine years. I also learnt more about Uncle Albert than I had ever suspected before; more, indeed, than I wanted to know, for overall the picture that slowly emerged was not a pretty one.

It became evident that Uncle Albert had devoted virtually his entire adult life to this project. The electronic record went back only twenty years or so, but it contained references to ideas he had developed and experiments he had carried out as far back as the nineteen sixties. What also became clear was that no one had even come close to appreciating either the scale of his genius or the ruthless single-mindedness with which he had dedicated himself to his goal.

And the goal he pursued was sex. Nothing else mattered.

He had nothing but contempt for financial reward or academic honours — "baubles", he called them. All he wanted was to be given the resources he needed and to be left alone to pursue his work. The company met his requirements exactly. Every now and then he would let his bosses have some minor byproduct of his research that lent itself to commercial exploitation; in exchange they paid the bills and let him be.

Albert had clearly understood even as a young man that he was not what most women would want. Doubtless if he had cleaned himself up a bit and changed his clothes more often he could have found himself a partner, but he was not the man to genuflect to social conventions he despised, and in any event "a partner" was not what he wanted. He craved sex, endless promiscuous sex with hosts of voluptuous and willing "young ladies". A common enough male fantasy, it might be said; what made Albert different was that he thought he could achieve it.

What I hoped I might discover was any glimmer of recognition that these "young ladies" Albert so lusted after were autonomous individuals with their own intellect, their own hopes and fears, their own lives to lead. I never found it. To Albert, it seemed, they were nothing more than objects of carnal lust. Even when he incorporated into his project something that might appear to be to their benefit, his motives were always wholly selfish. And what depressed me most about this was that I was unable to deny that, post-FUCK, a similar trend was becoming evident in my own conduct.

Albert's earliest work had apparently focused on the sexual potential of the male. Experimenting on the company's laboratory monkeys, especially chimpanzees, he had developed drugs that increased both capacity and desire. In fact, he had a superior version of Viagra at least thirty years before anyone else. But, as with all his sexual discoveries, he had kept it to himself. In any case, it was only a beginning, so far as he was concerned; he did not want to administer drugs, he wanted the body to synthesise them itself. For this he had to enter the brain.

I could grasp Albert's work on the brain only in the sketchiest outline. But he was convinced from the start that it contained the potential to give him what he wanted; that it had abilities that lay dormant and unused, waiting only to be awakened.

Even bodily functions that appear wholly automatic, like sweating in hot weather, are controlled by the brain. Sexual functions are no exception. Albert dissected human and simian brains, studied brain scans, and experimented pitilessly on the company's unfortunate monkeys until at last he began to understand which parts of the brain controlled the sexual functions in which he was most interested and, especially, which chemical triggers would stimulate them. A crucial discovery was that the right chemical and hormonal trigger would not only cause a particular response; it would, so to speak, programme part of the brain to remember the response and repeat it without further external stimulation.

This process — "fixing", he called it — became central to his work. As he came to understand better the workings of the brain he found that he could target the "fixing" agent with great precision, then he found that he could "tie" to the fixing agent the chemical or hormone he wanted the brain to generate.

The cocktails of chemicals and hormones that constituted his "fixes" and "ties" could be taken orally or injected directly, although he was also interested in less conventional delivery mechanisms.

The first of these was by smell. It was well known that many animals have scent glands emitting special hormones called pheromones that produce a sexual response in potential mates. Human beings produce them too, but their effects were thought to be slight; moreover, the "vomeronasal" organ in the nose, which in many other animals is particularly sensitive to pheromones, was believed to be merely vestigial in humans.

Albert was convinced that the vomeronasal organ possessed immense latent power. Further experiments on the poor monkeys showed that the primitive parts of the brain with which it seemed to be connected could stimulate some elemental sexual responses, particularly in females. But, to his frustration, he could not manufacture any stimulant that would reliably generate such a response; it seemed that the chemical trigger was different from one individual to the next.

At the same time as Albert met with failure in this area, he achieved spectacular success in another. The company wanted him to work on new techniques to improve transplant surgery and in particular to overcome the tendency of the body to reject unfamiliar tissue. At first he regarded this as a distraction, and resisted it bitterly; then some initial results suggested ways in which this work would serve his purpose, and he pursued it with enthusiasm.

His approach was this: if the body would reject alien tissue, the solution was to stimulate it to grow the new tissue itself. Even Albert could hardly persuade the body to grow itself a fresh heart, but he could, and did, develop artificial hormones that would not only stimulate the production of relatively simple tissues such as body fat, but even instruct the body where to store them. The commercial potential of this was simply staggering but, as usual, Albert kept it to himself.

He also (and without their knowledge or consent) developed his colleagues' work on suppressing the immune system so that patients would be less likely to reject implanted tissue. His approach to tissue growth meant that rejection was no longer an issue, but the value to him of his colleagues' work was that he realised that the same techniques that they had devised to weaken the immune system could be applied in reverse to strengthen it considerably. Why, I wondered, was this so important? Was it, as I naïvely hoped at first, because he compassionately wanted to protect people from disease?

While Albert had difficulty in understanding the female response to pheromones, he had more success in stimulating the male brain to manufacture them. They would be produced within the lymphatic system and issued into the atmosphere through the apocrine glands in the form of sweat. (These are the glands, located mainly in the armpits and groin, that generate fat-rich (therefore smelly) sweat, as opposed to sweat glands elsewhere on the body, which emit almost odourless salty sweat. I had no idea of any of this until I read Albert's notes that day.)

By the early nineteen nineties Albert could administer hormones to male chimps (he preferred chimps because they share ninety-five per cent of their genetic code with us) that would cause them to emit pheromones, but, disappointingly, there would be no noticeable effect on female chimps in general.

On the very rare occasions, however, that the pheromones did generate a sexual response from a female, it would be spectacular. She would pursue the male relentlessly for sex and on mating with him she would apparently experience an overpowering climax far exceeding anything normally found even in the most sexually receptive females. And afterwards, she would always be fixated on that particular male, not necessarily to the exclusion of others (for her sexual responses appeared to be permanently enhanced) but in the sense that she wanted always to be near him and would enthusiastically mate with him at any opportunity.