Can we reduce love to a pill?

Could a pill or a squirt up your nose save your marriage? Maybe, according to a researcher, who is studying the chemical basis of that most elusive of emotions - love.

Larry Young says his ultimate quest is not a high-tech love potion but to shed light on serious conditions like autism, which affects the ability to form social attachments, by studying brain chemicals involved in emotional attachment.

"Biologists may soon be able to reduce certain mental states associated with love to a biochemical chain of events," Young, of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta, wrote in the journal Nature.