Professor Young’s experiments with prairie voles revealed what poets never could: how the brain processes that fluttering feeling in the heart.
Prairie voles are stocky rodents and Olympian tunnellers that surface in grassy areas to feast on grass, roots and seeds with their chisel-shaped teeth, sprouting migraines in farmers and gardeners.
But to Larry Young, they were the secret to understanding romance and love.
Professor Young, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta, used prairie voles in a series of experiments that revealed the chemical process for the pirouette of heart-fluttering emotions that poets have tried to put into words for centuries.
He died on March 21 in Tsukuba, Japan, where he was helping to organize a scientific conference. He was 56. His wife, Anne Murphy, said the cause was a heart attack.
With their beady eyes, thick tails and sharp claws, prairie voles are not exactly cuddly. But among rodents, they are uniquely domestic: They are monogamous, and the males and females form a family unit to raise their offspring together.
“Prairie voles, if you take away their partner, they show behavior similar to depression,” Professor Young told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2009. “It’s almost as if there’s withdrawal from their partner.”
That made them ideal for laboratory studies examining the chemistry of love.
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