By Cynthia Gorney Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, June 30, 2002; Page W08
<.....> What really interested everybody in the room was the brain of the lady in the imaging machine, and what directives her brain was going to send to the target area once the video began playing through her goggles and headphones.
The video was 45 minutes long, and divided into three segments. The first and last were excerpts from a bland documentary about military pilots. The middle segment was a sequence of nicely lighted scenarios in which men and women take each other's clothes off and have sex. In the research departments of certain pharmaceutical companies around the country, there is a wondrously clinical name for scenarios of this genre; they are called Visual Sexual Stimulation, and for some weeks now I had been talking to R&D people who refer to VSS in the same brisk, enthusiastic voice an auto safety engineer might use when mentioning an especially satisfactory crash test. They had told me about Sexual Function Surveys, too, and about promising lab studies involving pharmaceutically aroused rats, and about the medical conferences that are developing into crowded, edgy, big-deal events, with researchers and business people mingling in the friendly cutthroat way of colleagues who understand that staggering sums of money are almost certainly at stake.
The goal, the anticipated source of these staggering sums of money, is a women's equivalent to Viagra.
[full piece at:] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61747-2002Jun28.htm l