Philip Brubaker was an unusual child, always questioning, always looking for hidden meaning, never taking a break from his inherent overpowering intellectual curiosity. Distinct from most children like him who change dramatically when they get older, Philip never did yield to convention. His intellectual curiosity remained the hallmark of his existence even into adulthood.
While Philip was a beautiful child who became a handsome man he didn't have the benefit of normal social interactions as he matured, and in fact never sought them out. However, most people have strong sexual urges and Philip was no exception. Unlike most people, though, his sexual urges did not manifest themselves in aggressive sexual behavior, but rather in an intellectual search for the physiological basis for human sexual attraction.
After receiving his Master's degree in organic chemistry at the young age of twenty one when he graduated at the top of his class from Northwestern University, Philip was able to parlay his Master's Thesis "Generalization of Mammalian Chemical Responses to Human Sexual Attractiveness" into two grants from cosmetics companies to find the elusive human pheromone. For at least a half century the pursuit of the existence of the human pheromone has been analogized as the scientific equivalent of the fountain of youth allegory. Despite numerous prestigious scientists' research into the subject no human pheromone had been located, and just before Philip started on his quest the most widely accepted view of the scientific community was expressed in a January 2018 paper in an organic chemistry journal as follows:
"As for pheromone products, the main active ingredient in them is likely 'hope.' The placebo effect is strong. If you have spent $50 on something to add to your perfume, you might go out to the bar with greater confidence, and that's how an effect by individual consumers could be realizedβbut it's not because of anything in the products. There simply is no evidence of a human pheromone."
Despite that prevailing view the two cosmetics companies came up with $150,000 each to finance Philip's research for two years so that he didn't have to live in poverty to pursue his scientific dream. At the time that he started his research Philip already was either well versed in, or had memorized, all studies identifying pheromones in insects and some mammals, including deer and pigs. However, he found none of those studies illuminating and discarded them completely in view of one of the basic tenants of the definition of a pheromone - species specificity.
That is, a pheromone is comprised of one or only a few chemicals, is species-specific, has well-defined behavioral or endocrine effects, and is little influenced by learning. Philip started out with the hypothesis that human pheromones existed in primitive human cultures but as society advanced and infant mortality greatly diminished, pheromone secretion and receptivity became less and less important for species survival, and became so diluted that it was orders of magnitude less potent in most modern humans than it had been in ancient ancestors.
Philip started his research with another hypothesis which no scientist had previously embraced - that human pheromones are not just species-specific but partner-specific. That is, one's pheromone production and sensitivity are not general to all humans, but rather are specific only to a few - those that you most likely would have the most rewarding sexual encounters with.
Philip started his research by evaluating three chemicals produced by apocrine sweat glands, eccrine sweat glands, and sebaceous glands, namely 5Ξ±-androst-16-en-3Ξ±-one (androstenone), 5Ξ±-androst-16-en-3Ξ±-ol (androstenol), or androsta-4,16-dien-3-one (androstadienone). He found these, and other lesser-known secretions of the human body, to have pheromonic efficacy. Within the two years that his grants were in force he proved his basic hypotheses, namely that with enhancement innate pheromones produced by most humans could be detected by others, but only others that had the proclivity to be receptive to those specific pheromones. In short he found that pheromone specificity was much like a blood type, only there were more than a thousand different pheromone markers that he had located or postulated, not like just eight (counting the Rh factor) blood types.
When his grants expired, the cosmetics companies did not renew them. While they were impressed with Philip's research - in fact both offered him lucrative jobs - they did not see the ability to make a successful product for sale to the general public using his research, and so were not interested in further funding him.
About a month after his funding had expired, Philip was talking with two of his few friends, a male and a female, over coffee when the female mentioned that she had met an interesting guy on an Internet match-making website. While Philip knew that such sites existed, he knew nothing of the details. Within the next thirty minutes Philip had extracted all the useful information that both of his friends had about such sites, and immediately knew what he would do next - develop his pheromone enhancing and matching research into a worthwhile commercial service.
While trying to find an "angel investor" to take his service from the research to the commercial phase, Philip was able to more particularly identify "markers" in enhanced pheromones that were much like DNA alleles, the exception being that while DNA is unique (except for identical twins or the few identical triplets in history) to a particular person, the pheromone markers were indicative of sexual matches and theoretically there were potentially thousands of people worldwide with possible matched pheromones for most individuals.
Philip's search for an angel investor was futile for almost a year before serendipity struck, just before he ran out of savings and he would have to take a job as a chemist in a large corporation. Philip did volunteer work mentoring indigent children in an afterschool program and one of his fellow volunteers - unknown to him and all the others associated with the program at the time - was the daughter of a multimillionaire businessman. When Philip described his idea to the daughter she introduced him to her father. While her father wasn't interested in pursuing it, he introduced Philip to a billionaire friend of his who did become interested. And so Philip started a business relationship with fifty year old Austen Whitaker, a self-made wealthy man.
Austen had a personal motive - aside from his belief that a pheromone matching service would be monetarily successful - in getting into business with Philip. Austen had a twenty year old stepdaughter Alisa who was obviously the apple of his eye, and the person he most cherished in life, ostensibly even more so that his wife, and Alisa's mother, Brenda. Alisa had already had several bad relationships in her young life, and never found anyone who really "turned her on." Austen saw the pheromone matching service as a way to match her with someone who would be good for her, perhaps even perfect. When Philip met Alisa she seemed almost as intrigued as Austen was, and indicated that her mother Brenda was also intrigued - although Philip did not meet Brenda at that time.
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With Austen's money, the hiring of two assistant chemists, five computer gurus, and another half-dozen marketing majors, P-Match Services quickly started getting ready for commercialization. The plan was that anyone who wanted to participate would have to provide a two-inch square sweat-soaked cloth, a cheek swab, and a blood sample, along with a subscription fee of $500, to have their pheromone "markers" determined, and placed in a database. The database would also include basic information about the participant including age, sex (even though the pheromone markers and DNA from the swab would already determine that), brief medical history, geographic location,size, race, and like information. Potential participants could go to one of several hundred pre-existing medical clinics around the U. S. (where the marketing started) and pay a $100 fee to have these fluids extracted. As part of the $500 fee, a participant would be provided with a one year supply of pills - taken once a week - which enhanced pheromone production and sensitivity.
Also, for liability and moral reasons, each participant would have to swear in front of a notary that he or she was not married and not in an exclusive committed relationship. P-Match Services didn't want to be an Ashley Madison.
Sadly, Philip's research had determined that about 12% of humans had pheromone production or sensitivity that could not be sufficiently enhanced, and for those individuals $350 of their $500 was refunded once that was determined.
Within a year P-Match Services was up and running. As the database increased, so too did the successful matches. Within eighteen months from startup there were already more than 1500 successful matches (as determined by the criteria of the participants in the matches), which successes were widely touted by P-Match on social media, and via email to its participants, and the business was financially successful. Especially pleasing to Philip as a scientist was the low failure rate; only five failures in the more than 1500 matches identified, and two of those failures were due to what turned out to be compromised data.
Austen Whitaker was especially pleased because within six months of startup Alisa had been successfully matched with not one, but with two, guys who she had fantastic sexual relationships with, and there was every indication that she would choose one of them as a life mate.
The only negative part of the entire experience was that Philip never found a suitable match for himself in those eighteen months. While there was one woman whose markers were properly aligned with his, she was sixty years old and had a home situation that was intolerable, so Philip never consummated a sexual encounter with her.
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At the eighteen month, six day, and four hour mark after P-Match went commercial, two of Philip's employees - John, a male chemist, and Terri, the female manager of the computer department - came into his office with big smiles on their faces.
