A French perfumer, asked to describe a particular scent molecule, declares, "It smells of the woman who neglects herself." It's precisely this pungent leap from chemistry to metaphor that Burr negotiates so well in his fascinating and lucid book about the sense of smell. No one really knows how the nose works. For the person who figures it out, a Nobel prize surely waits, along with the lucrative gratitude of the multinational perfume companies. Burr's candidate is Luca Turin, a London-based research scientist whom he presents as a Continental rogue, unfettered polymath, and pure sensualist. Turin is good company, and his "vibrational" theory of smell neatly upends conventional thinking, by claiming that the nose is the body's spectroscope and analyzes molecules by electron bond rather than by shape. As both the author and the subject admit, the evidence is still preliminary, but the details of Turin's work unfold like a revelation. For his part, Burr does a fine job of turning both the science and the academic jockeying around a possible publication in Nature into a pulse-racing affair.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker Science is supposed to be rational and objective, but in the real world, as mettlesome journalist Burr discovered while chronicling an ingenuous scientist's approach to solving one of the greatest mysteries of the body, how smell works, it is more often ego-driven, avaricious, and viciously resistant to fresh ideas. Burr, author of A Separate Creation (1996), met Luca Turin by chance, just one of the countless serendipitous moments that typify this cosmopolitan biophysicist's intuitive and innovative approach to science. Possessed of a capacious intellect, an obsession with smell, and a passion for perfume, Turin has always, Burr writes, "picked up information like flypaper." This gift, coupled with Turin's preternaturally sensitive nose, phenomenal memory, and prodigious ability to precisely describe scents, enabled him to write his renowned Parfums: Le Guide (1992)--which granted him precious access to the secretive big seven fragrance corporations--and to think outside the box and challenge the clearly flawed, but persistent, theory that scents are recognized by molecular shape. Turin is certain that it's molecular vibrations, and the scandalous story of his thwarted efforts to publish his exciting and provocative findings, thanks to Burr's vigorous writing style, incisive portraits, and scientific explication, is as suspenseful as it is fascinating. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"A brilliant, feisty scientist at the center of a nasty, back-stabbing, utterly absorbing, cliff-hanging scramble for the Nobel Prize. The Emperor of Scent is a quirky, wonderful book."
-John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
"Professional perfume critic, obsessive collector of rare fragrances, academic-bad-boy biochemist and world-class eccentric, Luca Turin would be the worthy subject of a book even if he hadn't come up with a revolutionary scientific theory. Written with skill and verve,The Emperor of Scent is an engrossing intellectual detective story about one iconoclast's quest to solve a centuries-old mystery--how smell works."
-Miles Harvey, author of The Island of Lost Maps
"The Emperor of Scent is a gem of a book--a suspense story at whose heart is a man of super-human powers who is also flawed and justifiably arrogant and dangerously steeped in hubris. I challenge any intelligent, curious mind not to tumble into this story and find themselves immediately engrossed. I fell in love with Luca Turin--he is everything I admire in a human: irreverent, witty, imaginative, determined, elitist without a trace of snobbery and above all a creative genius. And Chandler Burr is a magician himself, and a man we should all be so lucky to have at a dinner party: I was mesmerized and enlightened by the many perfect asides woven into the main body of this incredible true tale."
-Alexandra Fuller, author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
From the Inside Flap
For as long as anyone can remember, a man named Luca Turin has had an uncanny relationship with smells. He has been compared to the hero of Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume, but his story is in fact stranger, because it is true. It concerns how he made use of his powerful gifts to solve one of the last great mysteries of the human body: how our noses work.
Luca Turin can distinguish the components of just about any smell, from the world’s most refined perfumes to the air in a subway car on the Paris metro. A distinguished scientist, he once worked in an unrelated field, though he made a hobby of collecting fragrances. But when, as a lark, he published a collection of his reviews of the world’s perfumes, the book hit the small, insular business of perfume makers like a thunderclap. Who is this man Luca Turin, they demanded, and how does he know so much? The closed community of scent creation opened up to Luca Turin, and he discovered a fact that astonished him: no one in this world knew how smell worked. Billions and billions of dollars were spent creating scents in a manner amounting to glorified trial and error.
The solution to the mystery of every other human sense has led to the Nobel Prize, if not vast riches. Why, Luca Turin thought, should smell be any different? So he gave his life to this great puzzle. And in the end, incredibly, it would seem that he solved it. But when enormously powerful interests are threatened and great reputations are at stake, Luca Turin learned, nothing is quite what it seems.
Acclaimed writer Chandler Burr has spent four years chronicling Luca Turin’s quest to unravel the mystery of how our sense of smell works. What has emerged is an enthralling, magical book that changes the way we think about that area between our mouth and our eyes, and its profound, secret hold on our lives.
From the Back Cover
"A brilliant, feisty scientist at the center of a nasty, back-stabbing, utterly absorbing, cliff-hanging scramble for the Nobel Prize. The Emperor of Scent is a quirky, wonderful book."
-John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
"Professional perfume critic, obsessive collector of rare fragrances, academic-bad-boy biochemist and world-class eccentric, Luca Turin would be the worthy subject of a book even if he hadn't come up with a revolutionary scientific theory. Written with skill and verve,The Emperor of Scent is an engrossing intellectual detective story about one iconoclast's quest to solve a centuries-old mystery--how smell works."
-Miles Harvey, author of The Island of Lost Maps
"The Emperor of Scent is a gem of a book--a suspense story at whose heart is a man of super-human powers who is also flawed and justifiably arrogant and dangerously steeped in hubris. I challenge any intelligent, curious mind not to tumble into this story and find themselves immediately engrossed. I fell in love with Luca Turin--he is everything I admire in a human: irreverent, witty, imaginative, determined, elitist without a trace of snobbery and above all a creative genius. And Chandler Burr is a magician himself, and a man we should all be so lucky to have at a dinner party: I was mesmerized and enlightened by the many perfect asides woven into the main body of this incredible true tale."
-Alexandra Fuller, author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
About the Author
Chandler Burr is the author of A Separate Creation: The Search for the Biological Origins of Sexual Orientation. He has contributed to The Atlantic and has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
Mystery
Start with the deepest mystery of smell. No one knows how we do it.
Despite everything, despite the billions the secretive giant
corporations of smell have riding on it and the powerful computers they
throw at it, despite the most powerful sorcery of their legions of
chemists and the years of toiling in the labs and all the famous
neurowizardry aimed at mastering it, the exact way we smell
things–anything, crushed raspberry and mint, the subway at West
Fourteenth and Eighth, a newborn infant–remains a mystery. Luca Turin
began with that mystery.
Or perhaps he began further back, with the perfumes. “The reason I got
into this,” Turin will say, “is that I started collecting perfume. I’ve
loved perfume from when I was a kid in Paris and Italy.”
Or maybe (he’ll tell you another day, considering it from a different
angle), maybe it was “because I’m French, at least by upbringing.
Frenchmen will do things Anglo men won’t, and France is a country of
smells. There’s something called pourriture noble. Noble rot. It’s a
fungus. It grows on grapes, draws the water out, concentrates the juice
wonderfully, adds its own fungal flavor, and then you make wines like
the sweet Sauternes. Paradise. From rotten grapes. The idea that things
should be slightly dirty, overripe, slightly fecal is everywhere in
France. They like rotten cheese and dirty sheets and unwashed women. Guy
Robert is about seventy, a third-generation perfumer, lives in the south
of France, used to work for International Flavors & Fragrances, created
Calèche for Hermès. One day he asked me, ‘Est-ce que vous avez senti
some molecule or other?’ And I said no, I’d never smelled it, what’d it
smell like? And he considered this gravely and replied, ‘ça sent la
femme qui se néglige.’ ” (It smells of the woman who neglects herself.)
This makes him remember something, and he leans forward
enthusiastically. “One of the stories I heard when I started meeting the
perfumers and was let into their tightly closed world involves Jean
Carles, one of the greatest perfume makers in Paris–he used to work for
Roure in Grasse, near Nice, where all perfumes used to be made. He
became anosmic, lost his sense of smell, and he simply carried on from
memory, creating perfumes. Like Beethoven after his deafness. Jean
Carles went on to create the great Ma Griffe for Carven, a result of
pure imagination in the complete absence of the relevant physical sense.
Carles’s condition was known only to him and his son. When a client came
in, he’d go through the motions, make a big show of smelling various
ingredients and, finally, the perfume he had created, which he would
present with great gravity to the client, smelling it and waving its
odor around the room. And he couldn’t smell anything!” Turin smiles,
thinking about it.
The perfume obsession led Turin to write the perfume guide, which out of
the blue cracked open for him doors into the vast, secret world in which
perfumes are created, and there he started noticing little things that
didn’t make sense. A weird warp in official reality. Plus there were the
other clues, the small pockets of strangeness he bumped into in the
scientific literature, carefully fitting these into the puzzle without
even realizing it, without (as he’d be the first to admit) really
understanding what he was doing. And somewhere along the line, between
scouring the French Riviera for bottles of buried fragrances, pursuing
(in his own very particular way) the strange triplets of biology and
chemistry and physics, and prowling the library’s remotest stacks,
randomly sliding into things he found there–something that due to his
intellectual promiscuity he does a lot of–somewhere Luca Turin got the
idea of cracking smell. But it started with the mystery at smell’s
heart, which is not only that we don’t know how we do it. We actually
shouldn’t be able to smell at all.
From everything we know about evolution and molecular biology, smell
does the impossible. Look at two other systems inside your body, and
you’ll understand.
First, digestion. Human beings have evolved over millennia while eating
certain molecules–lipids and carbohydrates and proteins in the roots and
berries and various unlucky animals we’ve gotten our hands on. The tiny
carbs and proteins are made of tinier atoms and molecules, and for your
body to burn them as various fuels, evolution has engineered a digestive
system for you. The system’s first task is to recognize which raw fuel
it’s dealing with, so it can send out the right enzymes to break that
fuel down, process it for us. (Enzymes are catalysts, molecule
wranglers, and every enzyme in every one of our cells–and there are tens
of thousands of different enzymes–binds to a molecule and processes it.
Some break molecules down, scrapping them to use their dismantled parts,
some zip them together, and some rearrange them for the body’s own
purposes.) But in every case the enzyme “recognizes” its molecule by
that molecule’s particular shape. Fat, thin, lumpy, rounded, oblong,
rectangular. The enzyme feels some cleft in some molecule, fits its
special fingers into it like a key fits into a lock. And if the shape of
the lock and the shape of the key conform, bingo: Recognition! By shape.
And what gives a molecule its shape? We think of atoms as these
perfectly symmetrical spheres, shining and frozen on labels of
“Super-Strong!” kitchen cleaners, their electrons zipping around their
nuclei like perfectly spherical stainless-steel bracelets. Since
electrons move at close to the speed of light, if you filmed those
cartoon atoms in motion you’d see a round electron membrane, a solid,
buzzing sphere made of blisteringly fast-moving electrons.
But that’s kitchen-cleaner labels. The skins of atoms are actually made
of the paths of their outermost electrons, but not only don’t they zip
around in perfectly circular orbits, they carve an almost infinite
variety of 3-D orbital grooves around their nuclei. If that’s not
enough, atoms get shoved against and glued to one another in molecules,
forming bulbous structures, or nonspherical structures with disks and
oblongs. Imagine taking the giant inflatable balloons in the Macy’s
parade, each one shaped differently, and pushing them against one
another; their skins smoosh and warp, their bulbs and crevices contract
and expand. So the electrons zip along in these new configurations, in
elongated ellipses and valleys and sharp peaks and strange arcs. Which
means that each molecule creates a unique shape that an enzyme can
recognize as precisely as a retinal scan.
In fact, molecular recognition is arguably the fundamental mechanism of
all life, and it is based on this single, universal principle: Shape.
Receptor cells from your head to your glands and skin recognize enzymes,
hormones, and neurotransmitters by their molecular shapes. The only
variable is time.
The thing about enzymes is that evolution has learned over millennia
that you’re going to need to digest (break down, make up, or molecularly
rearrange) certain things–wild almonds and crab apples and dead
squirrels (sugars, fats, and proteins)–and not others–raw petroleum or
sand or silicate (fluorocarbons and borazines). So evolution has by now
selected for you a complete, fixed genetic library of enzymes that will
bind to and deal with a fixed list of molecules. (It’s not an exact
one-to-one enzyme-to-foodstuff ratio, but it’s precise enough that it’s
why your dog famously can’t digest chocolate, a culinary product his
wolf ancestors never ate: evolution never selected for dogs an enzyme
that recognized the shape of chocolate’s molecules, so if you feed them
these molecules, they get sick.) And if just one enzyme is missing, you
end up with nasty, sometimes lethal, diseases and disorders. You can
dump the squirrels for terrine de lapin et petits légumes, it doesn’t
matter: it’s the same lipids and proteins in your library, and as long
as you don’t eat, say, plastic, for which you have no enzyme, your
digestive system happily recognizes the molecules you consume, be it
McDonald’s or the fifth course at the Clifton Inn. The thing to remember
here, however, is time: enzymes stand ready to identify the right
molecule instantly.
For contrast, take the immune system. Antibodies are designed (they have
to be) to bind to things that weren’t around our ancestors, unknown
bacteria and foreign parasites and each year’s new, nastier, mutated
viruses we’ve never seen before. Your visual system can recognize things
that weren’t in Homo sapiens’s evolutionary environment, like Ferraris
and Star Wars and Barbra Streisand, and so can your immune system, but
your visual system deciphers photon wavelengths while your immune system
is feeling out molecules’ shapes. Here’s the difference. When it
encounters a new virus, the immune system starts rapidly rearranging
genes at random, spewing out antibodies until it hits on one that fits
the invader’s shape, binds to it, and destroys it. (It’s the exact
opposite of a “fixed library” idea; Susumu Tonegawa of MIT won a 1987
Nobel Prize for figuring this out.) So that’s why you’re at home for a
few days with the flu. Your immune system needs time to break the
invader’s shape code and produce t...
