http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/can-atmospheric-chemists-rescue-stalled-quest-human-pheromone > Decades of research have failed to yield any human pheromones. > CHICHELEY, U.K.—Jonathan Williams mostly studies the molecules that oceans and rainforests give off into the atmosphere. He’s an unlikely recruit to a new cause: rescuing the decadeslong search for a human pheromone—a chemical signal in human body odor—from the doldrums. Williams, who is at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, joined two other atmospheric chemists here last week at a small Royal Society meeting on chemical communication in humans to describe how their workhorse technique for studying trace chemicals in the atmosphere, proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry (PTR-MS), could aid the pheromone hunt. “It really feels like we are on the brink of something great,” says one of the meeting’s organizers, psychologist Craig Roberts of the University of Stirling in the United Kingdom.