The text below is from an exhibit featured at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, CA. I visited about a month after arriving in the state.
Photoshop paintingJ.F.M. Hoeniger, (General Microbiology 32:30, 1965.) suggests that the explanation for this practice of administering ants eggs to one afflicted with (and desiring to fall out of) love lies in the chemical composition of ant eggs or more precisely and pupae. The sack or membranous tissue which encloses the pupae contains measurable quantities of the naloxone hydrochloride which exhibits marked anendorfic (endorfin inhibiting) qualities by effectively blocking the opiod receptor sites in the brain without producing the agonistic response (cell excitation) which typically results from the endorfin bond with the receptor sites produced in the "love" or other endorfin producing states.
1 comment:
Just discovered this blog posting because I was searching for any web presence of the mentioning of this exhibit (I went to the MJT last week). As far as I can tell, while J.F.M. (Judith) Hoeniger was a real microbiologist (at the University of Toronto), she never published an article about ants' eggs. She published only one article in General Microbiology, and it was about the bacterium Proteus.
I realize that the whole point of the MJT is that some things are real and some things aren't, but I was actually hoping this was one of those weird but true things.
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