Poets, playwrights, and songwriters will always find something new to say about love, because each generation is born, quite literally, from love's latest definition. Despite being at the very center of life, however, love has held little fascination for scientists.

Traditionally, it was considered too subjective a phenomenon to allow for quantitative analysis. Highly individual by its very nature, drawing scientific conclusions about love seemed impossible. As Stanford University's William B. Hurlbut asks, "in what terms do we measure love, quantifying and calibrating its dimensions and qualities, without reducing and destroying the very phenomenon we seek to understand?" So, love, like beauty — another under-researched natural occurrence — has remained cloaked in mystery.

This may soon change. Late last year, a total of 21 researchers received financial grants for proposals that will look at love in a variety of ways. The grants are from the newly-established Institute for Research on Unlimited Love (IRUL), located at the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

"Our overall interest is learning what capacities within human nature affect our ability to be warm, generous and other-regarding," said Dr. Stephen G. Post, President of the Institute, which is a not-for-profit organization initiated by the John Templeton Foundation. "Is it possible to learn how to care equally for the neediest among us, not just our nearest and dearest?"

In January of 2002, IRUL sent out its first request for research proposals. Experts reviewed over 350 letters of intent, and then invited submission of full grant applications from nearly 100 scholars in July. Of these, including applications from Stanford, UCLA, Duke, Harvard, Princeton and Yale, 21 received grants that range from $30,000 to $100,000. Dr. Post emphasized that the scope of research topics being funded is deliberately quite broad. They range from questions of how love affects health and human development, to how evolutionary biology and religious faith influence the human capacity for unlimited love. Unlimited love doesn't mean the everyday respect we accord others through general rules of etiquette and social decorum. Rather, IRUL defines it as "altruistic affirmation and care for all humanity without exception." The Good Samaritan, as described in the Bible, is the archetypal giver of unlimited love. The opposite might be Ebenezer Scrooge, described in Charles Dickens's 1843 tale as "hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, self-contained and solitary as an oyster."

Though we may flatter ourselves that the same could not be said of us, Dr. Post suggests otherwise. "We are taught by many cultural venues that we should be ethical egoists," he said. "We've nearly given in to the teachings of Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. As such, we tend to see ourselves as the center of the universe, and others by how they contribute to our agenda."

As with individuals, so with society. Despite the cohesive pressures of globalization, idiosyncrasies of race, class, sex, and religion divide groups of people with more cruel precision that ever before. To span such rifts, as Dr. Post sees it, we need greater understanding of why some people are ethnically "color-blind," or how it is that someone will risk his or her life to save another.

Some might consider such questions to be outside the realm of science, but not Dr. Sue Carter, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois in Chicago. One of IRUL's new grant recipients, she is about to embark on a project that will study the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin, both of which have been shown to play an important role in developing bonds between parents and their offspring, or an infant and a non-parent caregiver.

"In the presence of a baby, both males and females will produce oxytocin. This hormone is made in the brain, so it can immediately affect behavior," she said. "Animals become more maternal when they get extra oxytocin. It resets the body's responsiveness to stress, and if you are exposed to oxytocin just once, it can make a lifelong change."

"What's most interesting about the baby model is that it possibly can be translated into other sorts of social attachment," Dr. Carter continued. "There may well be a physiological benefit to being altruistic, and to helping other people."

This last example is a thesis that two other grant recipients, Dr. Stephen Wright and Dr. Arthur Aron, will also explore. Conducted simultaneously at the University of California, Santa Cruz (Dr. Wright), and the State University of New York at Stony Brook (Dr. Aron), their studies will research the phenomenon of love shown between people of different ethnic groups. Contrary to our sense that making friendships is a unique, fragile enterprise, Dr. Wright says it is relatively easily duplicated, even in as contrived a setting as a science laboratory, through such means as reciprocal self-disclosure, laughter and shared mutual successes.

"Creating positive attitudes towards others is less about learning or knowledge, than connecting yourself affectively," Dr. Wright, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California in Santa Cruz, explained. "It's not about 'sensitivity training', but structuring opportunities for closeness. If we can experimentally produce ethnically-mixed friendships, our hope is to help practitioners in schools and neighborhoods to do the same."

A third study now underway is that of Dr. Robert Hierholzer, who will investigate how the experience of both divine and human love can mitigate the effects of trauma among war veterans in Fresno, California. Those who have post-traumatic stress disorder caused by military experiences will be given a battery of tests designed to assess the quality of their relationships with their parents, family and friends at various times throughout their lives. The idea for Dr. Hierholzer's experiment arose from his clinical observation that people who come from loving, secure households seem to have a much better ability to deal with trauma.

"The other dimension, though, is divine love. How does one's sense of God, or belief in a higher power affect post-traumatic stress disorder?" asks Dr. Hierholzer, who is Chief of Mental Health Service, V.A., Central California. "We've often been reluctant to recommend that people attend church. If we find this can nurture a side of them, though, we have an obligation to point this out. Most of my patients, for instance, struggle with guilt. Obviously, this is something that religion can address."

While there's general agreement that spiritual beliefs aren't necessary for an individual to have the capacity for altruistic love, history is filled with the record of those whose other-regarding virtues sprang from a particular relationship with a Supreme Being. Ghandi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama are just a few such figures. Could it be, then, that the way humans experience what is most divine is through unlimited love?

Dr. Post, for one, thinks yes. "All the great world religions speak about love of all humanity without a single exception. Can we find, through science, a way to reaffirm these teachings? I think we can."

"I am optimistic about individuals and the cultural future — if for no other reason, than because there is really no viable alternative," he concluded. "We'll either, as a species, learn to love each other or humanity will end."

The Institute for Research on Unlimited Love International Advisory Board
Bishop Craig B. Anderson, Ph.D., Herbert Benson, M.D., Don S. Browning, Ph.D., Rosalynn Carter, Audrey R. Chapman, Ph.D., M. Div., Millard Fuller, Reverend Dr. Otis Moss, Jr., Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Ph.D., Jacob Neusner, Ph.D., Samuel P. Oliner, Ph.D., Olayemi Olufemi-Julius Omotade, M.D., Edmund D. Pellegrino, M.D., Stephen C. Rockefeller, Jr., Dame Cicely Saunders, OM, DBE, FRCP, Lynn G. Underwood, Ph.D., George E. Vailland, M.D., Susan Wentz, M.D.

Stephen Henderson, a writer based in New York City, contributes frequently to the New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, Town & Country, and Religion News Service, as well as other publications.