Word: mhc
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...Scent not only tells males which females are primed to conceive, but it also lets both sexes narrow their choices of potential partners. Among the constellation of genes that control the immune system are those known as the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), which influence tissue rejection. Conceive a child with a person whose MHC is too similar to your own, and the risk increases that the womb will expel the fetus. Find a partner with sufficiently different MHC, and you're likelier to carry a baby to term...
...Studies show that laboratory mice can smell too-similar MHC in the urine of other mice and will avoid mating with those individuals. In later work conducted at the University of Bern in Switzerland, human females were asked to smell T shirts worn by anonymous males and then pick which ones appealed to them. Time and again, they chose the ones worn by men with a safely different MHC. And if the smell of MHC isn't a deal maker or breaker, the taste is. Saliva also contains the compound, a fact that Haselton believes may partly explain the custom...
...Precise as the MHC-detection system is, it can be confounded. One thing that throws us off the scent is the birth-control pill. Women who are on the Pill-which chemically simulates pregnancy-tend to choose wrong in the T-shirt test. When they discontinue the daily hormone dose, the protective smell mechanism kicks back in. "A colleague of mine wonders if the Pill may contribute to divorce," says Wysocki. "Women pick a husband when they're on birth control, then quit to have a baby and realize they've made a mistake...
...Unfortunately, for those willing to risk it, "there is no such official club per se," says San Diego-based businessman Phil Kessler, who owns the U.S. trademark for "Mile High Club." Still, his eight-year-old website, milehighclub.com, offers "MHC"-branded merchandise and lists dozens of stories about World War II soldiers trysting over the South Pacific to married couples spicing up their summer vacations. No doubt Sperry, who died in a crash seven years after his inaugural rendezvous, looks down at this with lusty approval...
...Wiley and then-postdoctoral fellow Pamela J. Bjorkman used a technique called x-ray crystallography to determine the three-dimensional positions of all the atoms in the class I MHC molecule...