According to Komisaruk, the next logical step was to examine how sex hormones affect neurons. In the 1970's, he studied with James Olds, a neuroscientist who discovered the “pleasure centers” in the brain. Olds had developed technology to record activity of single neurons in awake animals and invited Komisaruk to the University of Michigan to see if he could correlate the activity of single neurons in the brain to the rats’ behavior. In Olds’ lab, Komisaruk used different stimuli—brushing the face; giving the subjects chocolate, milk, and water; pinching a toe—and measured their neurological responses.

“Because in previous labs I saw that vaginal stimulation had such strong effects on the activity of neurons,” Komisaruk explains, “it was obvious to try the same stimulus in the awake rats in Olds’ lab.”

The test on the rats was simple. If you lightly pinch a rat’s foot, there is a pain reflex response as the leg withdraws from the pinch. When Komisaruk inserted a glass rod “dildo,” as he calls it, into the rat’s vagina, it became immobilized and went into the mating posture. Rats only mate every five days, on their cycle, but these female rats went into mating posture immediately upon vaginal stimulation at all stages of their cycle. When Komisaruk pinched their feet, that crucial pain response did not occur.

Was this a state of paralysis? Could they not feel the pain at all or was it the sexual state that overtook the pain altogether? Was the rat actually not feeling pain? He couldn’t ask the rats, but a similar experiment with human women would be able to provide him with the verbal feedback he needed.

Back at Rutgers in the early 80's, Komisaruk ran a course on human sexuality. He had heard about the research that Beverly Whipple, a registered nurse on the faculty of Gloucester College, was conducting on what she termed the “G-spot” or “Grafenberg spot” and on female ejaculation.

She would go on to become Dr. Beverly Whipple, co-author of The G Spot and Other Recent Discoveries About Human Sexuality and would be named one of the 50 most influential scientists in the world by New Scientist Magazine in 2006.

Komisaruk brought her in to give a guest lecture in his course. Whipple mentioned that she wanted to earn a Ph.D., so Komisaruk invited her to enroll in the doctoral program at Rutgers, and to join his lab study to look at whether vaginal stimulation blocks pain in women.

“He invited me to come speak,” Whipple says. “He wanted someone with experience [and] from the human subject he wanted a verbal report he couldn’t get from the rats. I wondered why the G-spot was there, and Barry wanted to work with women."

Whipple had been doing her own research for years. She was a sex therapist, a nurse, and now a doctoral student as well. Prior to meeting Whipple, Komisaruk had never done any sex research on humans.