The Emperor of Scent: A Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the Senses

From Publishers Weekly Nobody knows for sure what makes our noses work the way they do, not even the $20-billion-a-year perfume industry's legions of chemists, whose jobs depend on appealing to those noses. So what happens when Luca Turin, a likable scientist who happens to possess an unusually sensitive nose, proposes a new theory of smell that promises to unravel the mystery once and for all? That's what readers find out in this often funny, picaresque exposx82 of the closed world of whiffs, aromas and odors-and the people who study them. Burr (A Separate Creation: The Search for the Biological Origins of Sexual Orientation) narrates in depth Turin's efforts to publish in the journal Nature: the maddening peer review process lasts more than a year and ends with smug dismissals by scientists who don't understand his work. Turin, whose urbane personality carries the book, runs into similar brick walls when he tries to sell his ideas to the "Big Boys" of the secretive and byzantine perfume industry. Burr, who is skilled at parsing complex science and smart turns of phrase, enters the story in the first person to describe his own difficulties as a journalist writing about Turin: critics clam up and get hostile when asked about Turin's theory. Burr concludes that the hysterical, often incoherent resistance portrayed here "embodies the failure of the scientific process." Grim words for a book so full of wit.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal While waiting for the Eurostar, Burr, a regular contributor to the Atlantic Monthly and author of A Separate Creation, met Dr. Luca Turin, the titular emperor. A biophysicist at University College of London, Turin believes that the nose deciphers smell by using not the shape of molecules but their vibrations. He also possesses a unique gift for scent and the ability to write about perfumes as few can. From their chance meeting, Burr set out to write "the simple story of the creation of a scientific theory" by chronicling Turin's work over several years. Having quickly discovered that his subject's story was much more complex, Burr ends up taking readers into the perfume industry and the scientific publishing world. The view is not flattering (the ugly side of peer review is depicted here in all its backstabbing glory), but thanks to Burr's sensible and honest reporting, it is an accurate portrait. Burr is also straightforward about the difficulties of working with a brilliant and eccentric man like Turin. His fascinating book is highly recommended for all collections. --Michael D. Cramer, Schwarz BioSciences, RTP, NC Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. From The New Yorker 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 From Booklist 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 "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."xa0 - 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 <b>Perfume</b>, 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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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. "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."xa0 - 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 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 giantcorporations of smell have riding on it and the powerful computers theythrow at it, despite the most powerful sorcery of their legions ofchemists and the years of toiling in the labs and all the famousneurowizardry aimed at mastering it, the exact way we smellthings–anything, crushed raspberry and mint, the subway at WestFourteenth and Eighth, a newborn infant–remains a mystery. Luca Turinbegan with that mystery.Or perhaps he began further back, with the perfumes. “The reason I gotinto this,” Turin will say, “is that I started collecting perfume. I’veloved perfume from when I was a kid in Paris and Italy.”Or maybe (he’ll tell you another day, considering it from a differentangle), maybe it was “because I’m French, at least by upbringing.Frenchmen will do things Anglo men won’t, and France is a country ofsmells. There’s something called pourriture noble. Noble rot. It’s afungus. It grows on grapes, draws the water out, concentrates the juicewonderfully, adds its own fungal flavor, and then you make wines likethe sweet Sauternes. Paradise. From rotten grapes. The idea that thingsshould be slightly dirty, overripe, slightly fecal is everywhere inFrance. They like rotten cheese and dirty sheets and unwashed women. GuyRobert is about seventy, a third-generation perfumer, lives in the southof France, used to work for International Flavors & Fragrances, createdCalèche for Hermès. One day he asked me, ‘Est-ce que vous avez sentisome molecule or other?’ And I said no, I’d never smelled it, what’d itsmell like? And he considered this gravely and replied, ‘ça sent lafemme qui se néglige.’ ” (It smells of the woman who neglects herself.)This makes him remember something, and he leans forwardenthusiastically. “One of the stories I heard when I started meeting theperfumers and was let into their tightly closed world involves JeanCarles, one of the greatest perfume makers in Paris–he used to work forRoure in Grasse, near Nice, where all perfumes used to be made. Hebecame anosmic, lost his sense of smell, and he simply carried on frommemory, creating perfumes. Like Beethoven after his deafness. JeanCarles went on to create the great Ma Griffe for Carven, a result ofpure imagination in the complete absence of the relevant physical sense.Carles’s condition was known only to him and his son. When a client camein, he’d go through the motions, make a big show of smelling variousingredients and, finally, the perfume he had created, which he wouldpresent with great gravity to the client, smelling it and waving itsodor 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 ofthe blue cracked open for him doors into the vast, secret world in whichperfumes are created, and there he started noticing little things thatdidn’t make sense. A weird warp in official reality. Plus there were theother clues, the small pockets of strangeness he bumped into in thescientific literature, carefully fitting these into the puzzle withouteven realizing it, without (as he’d be the first to admit) reallyunderstanding what he was doing. And somewhere along the line, betweenscouring the French Riviera for bottles of buried fragrances, pursuing(in his own very particular way) the strange triplets of biology andchemistry and physics, and prowling the library’s remotest stacks,randomly sliding into things he found there–something that due to hisintellectual promiscuity he does a lot of–somewhere Luca Turin got theidea of cracking smell. But it started with the mystery at smell’sheart, which is not only that we don’t know how we do it. We actuallyshouldn’t be able to smell at all.From everything we know about evolution and molecular biology, smelldoes the impossible. Look at two other systems inside your body, andyou’ll understand.First, digestion. Human beings have evolved over millennia while eatingcertain molecules–lipids and carbohydrates and proteins in the roots andberries and various unlucky animals we’ve gotten our hands on. The tinycarbs and proteins are made of tinier atoms and molecules, and for yourbody to burn them as various fuels, evolution has engineered a digestivesystem for you. The system’s first task is to recognize which raw fuelit’s dealing with, so it can send out the right enzymes to break thatfuel down, process it for us. (Enzymes are catalysts, moleculewranglers, and every enzyme in every one of our cells–and there are tensof 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 ownpurposes.) But in every case the enzyme “recognizes” its molecule bythat molecule’s particular shape. Fat, thin, lumpy, rounded, oblong,rectangular. The enzyme feels some cleft in some molecule, fits itsspecial fingers into it like a key fits into a lock. And if the shape ofthe lock and the shape of the key conform, bingo: Recognition! By shape.And what gives a molecule its shape? We think of atoms as theseperfectly symmetrical spheres, shining and frozen on labels of“Super-Strong!” kitchen cleaners, their electrons zipping around theirnuclei like perfectly spherical stainless-steel bracelets. Sinceelectrons move at close to the speed of light, if you filmed thosecartoon 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 madeof the paths of their outermost electrons, but not only don’t they ziparound in perfectly circular orbits, they carve an almost infinitevariety of 3-D orbital grooves around their nuclei. If that’s notenough, atoms get shoved against and glued to one another in molecules,forming bulbous structures, or nonspherical structures with disks andoblongs. Imagine taking the giant inflatable balloons in the Macy’sparade, each one shaped differently, and pushing them against oneanother; their skins smoosh and warp, their bulbs and crevices contractand expand. So the electrons zip along in these new configurations, inelongated ellipses and valleys and sharp peaks and strange arcs. Whichmeans that each molecule creates a unique shape that an enzyme canrecognize as precisely as a retinal scan.In fact, molecular recognition is arguably the fundamental mechanism ofall 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 onlyvariable is time.The thing about enzymes is that evolution has learned over millenniathat you’re going to need to digest (break down, make up, or molecularlyrearrange) certain things–wild almonds and crab apples and deadsquirrels (sugars, fats, and proteins)–and not others–raw petroleum orsand or silicate (fluorocarbons and borazines). So evolution has by nowselected for you a complete, fixed genetic library of enzymes that willbind to and deal with a fixed list of molecules. (It’s not an exactone-to-one enzyme-to-foodstuff ratio, but it’s precise enough that it’swhy your dog famously can’t digest chocolate, a culinary product hiswolf ancestors never ate: evolution never selected for dogs an enzymethat recognized the shape of chocolate’s molecules, so if you feed themthese molecules, they get sick.) And if just one enzyme is missing, youend up with nasty, sometimes lethal, diseases and disorders. You candump the squirrels for terrine de lapin et petits légumes, it doesn’tmatter: it’s the same lipids and proteins in your library, and as longas you don’t eat, say, plastic, for which you have no enzyme, yourdigestive system happily recognizes the molecules you consume, be itMcDonald’s or the fifth course at the Clifton Inn. The thing to rememberhere, however, is time: enzymes stand ready to identify the rightmolecule instantly.For contrast, take the immune system. Antibodies are designed (they haveto be) to bind to things that weren’t around our ancestors, unknownbacteria and foreign parasites and each year’s new, nastier, mutatedviruses we’ve never seen before. Your visual system can recognize thingsthat weren’t in Homo sapiens’s evolutionary environment, like Ferrarisand Star Wars and Barbra Streisand, and so can your immune system, butyour visual system deciphers photon wavelengths while your immune systemis feeling out molecules’ shapes. Here’s the difference. When itencounters a new virus, the immune system starts rapidly rearranginggenes at random, spewing out antibodies until it hits on one that fitsthe invader’s shape, binds to it, and destroys it. (It’s the exactopposite of a “fixed library” idea; Susumu Tonegawa of MIT won a 1987Nobel Prize for figuring this out.) So that’s why you’re at home for afew days with the flu. Your immune system needs time to break theinvader’s shape code and produce t... Read more