Martha McClintock (born on February 22, 1947) [1]is an American psychologist best known for her research on human pheromones and her theory of menstrual synchrony. She is the David Lee Shillinglaw Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology at the University of Chicago and is the Founder and Director of the Institute for Mind and Biology.[2]
McClintock was born in Pasadena, California, and obtained her Bachelor's degree from Wellesley College in 1970. It was while at Wellesley that she conducted a research study of menstrual synchrony in women living in a college dormitory. Her studied asserted that women living together in a close community without the presence of males synchronized their menstrual cycles with each other. The McClintock effect of menstrual synchrony is named after this study, which was published in the journal Nature in 1971. ][3]
She proposed that the impact of menstrual synchrony is influenced by the two opposing axillary pheromones. Pheromones are simply chemical substances secreted by an animal which has an effect on the behaviour of a member of its species. These two opposing axillary pheromones influence the important events that occur in the reproductive cycle, possibly leading to contraception or treatment of sterility. [4]
In 1992 H. Clyde Wilson, professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri published a critique of McClintock's research in Psychoneuroendochrinology.[5] In that article, as well as in a 1987 article on human pheromones and menstruation published in Hormones and Behavior[6], Wilson analyzed the research and data collection methods McClintock and others used in their studies. He found significant errors in the researchers' mathematical calculations and data collection as well as an error in how the researchers defined synchrony. Wilson's own clinical research and his critical reviews of existing research have clearly demonstrated that menstrual synchrony in humans has not been proven.
McClintock obtained her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania with Norman Adler in 1974 and obtained a faculty position in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago in 1976. She also holds faculty appointments in the Department of Comparative Human Development, the Committee on Evolutionary Biology, and the Committee on Neurobiology. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Medicine in the National Academy of Sciences, and has received numerous awards and distinctions for her groundbreaking research.
In 1999, she founded the Institute for Mind and Biology at the University of Chicago, a research institute designed to foster transdisciplinary research in mind-body interactions and the biological basis of behavior. This innovative Institute enabled the creation of the Center for Interdisciplinary Health Disparities Research (CIHDR),[7] a multi million dollar initiative to explore and understand why African American women have a higher incidence of mortality from breast cancer than Caucasian women. McClintock is Co-Director of the Center.
Some of McClintock's other work include: Pheromonal regulation of the ovarian cycle: Enhancement, suppression and synchrony., Group mating in the domestic rat as a context for sexual selection: Consequences for analysis of sexual behavior and neuroendocrine responses., and A functional approach to the behavioral endocrinology of rodents.[8]
She believes that being able to control the ratio of male and female offspring in a litter can potentially lead to an improved understanding of the reasons that cause miscarriage. In general, Martha McClintock always tries to answer the question of how biology and one's environment influences sexual behaviour in her research. [9]
." Such leaps of association are all part of a day's work for McClintock: "As a feminist and an intellectual, it's fun to subvert the dominant paradigm."