Contact Us. BU-Stockholm University study Much less than six degrees can separate sexual partners. By Brian Fitzgerald. With surprising and somewhat frightening results, the concept behind "six degrees of separation" has been applied to sexual relationships in a study by Luis Amaral, a research associate at the GRS Center for Polymer Studies, and colleagues at Stockholm University.
The "six degrees" theory is that everyone in the world is just six acquaintances away from everyone else. The researchers, studying data from a sex survey of 2, Swedes, checked how many sexual partners respondents had had in one year.
They then estimated the number of sexual encounters needed to link two people. However, aside from the obvious shock appeal for the media -- one respondent reported more than sex partners in his life -- the research has serious epidemiological implications in a world that has 36 million people infected with HIV or AIDS, a figure that is 50 percent larger than the World Health Organization had predicted 10 years ago.
Eugene Stanley, Center for Polymer Studies director, and Stockholm University Sociology Professors Fredrik Liljeros, Christofer Edling, and Yvonne Aberg, concludes that sexual health campaigns could be far more effective if targeted toward the most promiscuous in a community -- the node, or center, in a web of sexual contact. To investigate the connectivity in the network of sexual contacts, the researchers analyzed the number of sexual partners over a relatively short time period: the 12 months before the survey.
Many countries operated under that assumption. But then it spread through significant populations in these countries. Amaral is interested in the structure of complex networks. And the Center for Polymer Studies, a scientific visualization research center of the CAS physics and mathematics departments, is devoted to interdisciplinary research in aspects of polymer, random, and fractal systems.
