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Larry Young, Who Studied the Chemistry of Love, Dies at 56
Professor Young’s experiments with prairie voles revealed what poets never could: how the brain processes that fluttering feeling in the heart.
![A portrait of Larry Young wearing a white button-down shirt and standing with his arms crossed in what appears to be a lab.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/05/04/multimedia/02Young--03-mvfp-print1/02Young--03-mvfp-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)
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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