A kiss is still a kiss? Maybe not after this

There are 3,790,000 Google entries for "kissing" in English alone. Among the top on the list is Virtualkiss.com where you can even send and pick up a virtual kiss in the shape and color of the lips of your choice. If Google had existed when I was in high school in the late 70s, it would have had my best friend exploding in scandalous shame.

We were both 13 then and one day, she and I were sharing lunch at the steps of the school auditorium when she said "Isabel, do you know that if you kiss a boy, you will actually share saliva with him and you will share all his germs and you will never know what you will catch from that?" She said in such a grossed-out declaration that we just really decided we would never ever kiss boys and we were going to be germ-free (at least from kissing) spinsters and spend our days watering the gardens of our convent school like that sweet 80-year-old nun who would also spray water on us when she watered her shrubs.

What confounds me to this day is why I did not even question her disgust over kissing when she was the one who dragged me then to sneak into the laboratories and storage rooms of the UP College of Medicine to look at bottled brains and other body parts swimming in formaldehyde. To cap the puzzle, she also became a medical doctor, a mother of twins and now, pregnant.

But as my way of adding to your post-Valentine traumatic stress and probably even to make a dent on controlling certain activities that lead to population increase, let me try grossing you out about kissing. Why? Because it is one of the sworn professional duties of science writers to gross you out about things, even the sublime.

We kiss with parts of our mouth — that is not breaking news — but the mouth is to bacteria what politics is to shady characters — quite the perfect environment since it is musty and dark and yet, goodies are passing through there all the time. A kiss advances in degrees anatomically. But unlike politics, bacteria found in the mouth are mostly "good" bacteria in the sense that we need them to fight off other strange alien bacteria that invade the mouth. But as I said, I have this singular aim of grossing you out so I want you to know that there are no less than 700 species of bacteria that regularly reside in your mouth and friendly or not, the thought of 700 kinds of anything in my own mouth, at the very least, makes me think again of who has the real governing power in my body if numbers mattered.

A kiss that involves only the lips calls for about eight muscles and one of them is called the buccinator (no kidding), which has its roots in "bucca" — meaning mouth, that would translate to "mouth-a-lator." But no matter how threatening that muscle sounds, it is really the orbicularis oris that really gives your lips that character which enables it to move, take different shapes when you talk and express yourself through that red tensile orifice when you pucker. But when kissing becomes more than a pucker confined to the lips, some other muscles that act like the hydraulic mechanisms for the mouth to open and close, get to work. And when as they say, the French contribution to kissing is summoned, some other muscles with "glossus" attached to their names are conscripted to action as well.

Soon enough as the kiss progresses, the lines open to the hormone-generals of the brain — oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin and adrenaline — the ones that make you see stars. Oxytocin makes you feel that you are attached to the beloved and not to his at least 700-strong bacteria types shaking hands with your own set of bacteria. Dopamine gives you a boost in your positive emotions as if the contact with the army of bacteria from your beloved has just teamed up with your own to do a musical! Serotonin is a major regulator and is involved in bodily processes such as sleep, sexual interest, body temperature. It is what keeps thoughts of bacteria far from your mind or if you think of them, it is to date them — matching your bacteria with your beloved’s bacteria and thinking it is the perfect match-making that ever happened germ-wise. Adrenaline is what accounts for the drums you feel that beat all over your being or if you will, the drum roll of the bacteria marching band, triumphant in what is by now far more than an affair of the mouth alone.

If you think that is not enough to gross you out, a new study by scientists in the School of Medicine of New York University, published in the Feb. 5 2007 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that our largest organ — the skin — harbors at least 182 species of bacteria, a good number of which have never shown their "faces" to science before. What was even surprising is that three-fourths of the kinds of bacteria seemed unique from person to person while the rest seemed permanent or at least long-term residents. Talk about the strangers that we are to one another! So while you are kissing and holding each other skin to skin and you feel like you are the center of the universe of the one kissing you, it really changes the picture if you start to think that to bacteria, you are just another airport (or bathroom) as they travel their itinerary in micro-world.

If you need an antidote (as I do) for the zapper of romance that this column was, read or reread Diane Ackerman’s timeless and beautiful book — A Natural History of the Senses — and pucker your sensory brain regions to home in on the pages on kissing. It begins with "Sex is the ultimate intimacy, the ultimate touching, when like two paramecia, we engulf one another." Hmm, we just traded bacteria for paramecia. But do read on with Ackerman. Eventually she will help you regain a sense once more of the species that you are — Homo sapiens — a creature who understands what a kiss means and either commits to it or flees from its spell. We all could use the reminder.

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