The former editor in chief of Surgery News and, until yesterday, the president-elect of the American College of Surgeons, Dr. Lazar Greenfield sure does have a way with words. In February, his editor's note in Surgery News basically said that contact with semen makes women happier and smarter. This made some people very angry. Here's a portion of his op-ed:

As far as humans are concerned, you may think you know all about sexual signals, but you'd be surprised by new findings. It's been known since the 1990s that heterosexual women living together synchronize their menstrual cycles because of pheromones, but when a study of lesbians showed that they do not synchronize, the researchers suspected that semen played a role. In fact, they found ingredients in semen that include mood enhancers like estrone, cortisol, prolactin, oxytocin, and serotonin; a sleep enhancer, melatonin; and of course, sperm, which makes up only 1%-5%. Delivering these compounds into the richly vascularized vagina also turns out to have major salutary effects for the recipient. Female college students having unprotected sex were significantly less depressed than were those whose partners used condoms (Arch. Sex. Behav. 2002;31:289-93). Their better moods were not just a feature of promiscuity, because women using condoms were just as depressed as those practicing total abstinence. The benefits of semen contact also were seen in fewer suicide attempts and better performance on cognition tests.

So there's a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there's a better gift for that day than chocolates.

That's probably debatable, to say the least. In a letter to the Times announcing his resignation as president-elect of the ACS, Dr. Greenfield wrote: "I only hope that those who choose to judge me will read the article in the spirit in which it was intended."