Product Description

Luca Turin was born with an uncannily powerful nose, able to distinguish the components of any scent, from the world's most refined perfumes to the air on the New York subways. A scientist, he kept his powers to himself, concentrating on other fields. But when, for the love of it, he began to write reviews of fragrances, and those reviews took the world by storm, everything changed. The secret world of scent creation opened up, and Turin discovered something astonishing: No one understands how our noses work. Billions and billions of dollars are spent creating the scents all around us in a manner that amounts to a glorified trial and error. The solution to the mystery of every other human sense had led to a Nobel Prize. Why should smell be any different? Turin has given his life to this great riddle. And in the end, incredibly, after an epic struggle, he solved it. Then things got really interesting...Chandler Burr tells the extraordinary story of Luca Turin, his incredible sense of smell and his battles with the scientific establishment in as a remarkable quirky a tale of obsession as Susan Orlean's bestseller "The Orchid Thief".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #51590 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

About the Author
Chandler Burr is the author of A Separate Creation: The Search for the Biological Origins of Sexual Orientation. He lives in New York.

Excerpted from The Emperor of Scent: A Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the Senses by Chandler Burr. Copyright © 2003. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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 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 hidden 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.

Customer Reviews

"A tale...of jealousy, calcified minds, vested interests."
Telling the story of Luca Turin, a French scientist who, in the mid-1990s, developed a revolutionary new theory about how we smell, Chandler Burr focuses on the evolution of the theory and why it has not led to a Nobel Prize. Turin, a controversial researcher, posited (and believes he proved) that scent is not determined by the body's ability to recognize the shape of molecules, the accepted explanation of smell. Instead, he believes that vibrations of electrons are recognized by a kind of "spectroscope" in our noses--that atoms with the same vibrations have the same smell even when they come from different elements.

Burr details Turin's experiments and his successful (he believes) searches for proof through the late 1990s. But he also describes Turin's unsuccessful attempts to be published in prestigious scientific magazines, his battles royal with other researchers, some of whom have rejected his ideas without reading his papers, and his disappointments with the "Big Boys," the world's seven biggest makers of perfumes, who would benefit directly if Turin were correct. Ultimately, Burr concludes that the scientific community and its attitudes toward Turin reflect their "scientific corruption, corruption in the most mundane and systemic [sense]."

For whatever reasons, Burr is unsuccessful in getting opposing scientists to discuss Turin's vibration theory in relation to their belief in a molecule's shape as a determinant of smell, and he ultimately presents a book that is biased in favor of Turin's work. By the end of the book, Burr has clearly abandoned any sense of impartiality and become a supporter of Turin. He inserts an Author's Note three-quarters of the way into the book to justify his inability to present an alternative viewpoint, concluding that scientific rejection of Turin's theory is the result of "vested self-interest and bad science."

Turin is clearly a difficult man, however, and his attitudes, reflected in humorous and sarcastic comments about other scientists and their ideas, may well have contributed to his lack of acceptance. Though one of his supporters praises him for being the first person to apply quantum mechanics to a physical problem, he also indicates that Turin's biggest flaw is his impatience. (In fact, Turin has already abandoned this work, moving on to a new project studying energy storage in cells.) Fascinating, though complex in its discussions of biology, chemistry, and physics, the book is also fun to read--the story of a maverick who had a great idea which no one takes seriously, at least not yet. Mary Whipple

"A tale...of jealousy, calcified minds, vested interests."
Telling the story of Luca Turin, a French scientist who, in the mid-1990s, developed a revolutionary new theory about how we smell, Chandler Burr focuses on the evolution of the theory and why it has not led to a Nobel Prize. Turin, a controversial researcher, posited (and believes he proved) that scent is not determined by the body's ability to recognize the shape of molecules, the accepted explanation of smell. Instead, he believes that vibrations of electrons are recognized by a kind of "spectroscope" in our noses--that atoms with the same vibrations have the same smell even when they come from different elements.

Burr details Turin's experiments and his successful (he believes) searches for proof through the late 1990s. But he also describes Turin's unsuccessful attempts to be published in prestigious scientific magazines, his battles royal with other researchers, some of whom have rejected his ideas without reading his papers, and his disappointments with the "Big Boys," the world's seven biggest makers of perfumes, who would benefit directly if Turin were correct. Ultimately, Burr concludes that the scientific community and its attitudes toward Turin reflect their "scientific corruption, corruption in the most mundane and systemic [sense]."

For whatever reasons, Burr is unsuccessful in getting opposing scientists to discuss Turin's vibration theory in relation to their belief in a molecule's shape as a determinant of smell, and he ultimately presents a book that is biased in favor of Turin's work. By the end of the book, Burr has clearly abandoned any sense of impartiality and become a supporter of Turin. He inserts an Author's Note three-quarters of the way into the book to justify his inability to present an alternative viewpoint, concluding that scientific rejection of Turin's theory is the result of "vested self-interest and bad science."

Turin is clearly a difficult man, however, and his attitudes, reflected in humorous and sarcastic comments about other scientists and their ideas, may well have contributed to his lack of acceptance. Though one of his supporters praises him for being the first person to apply quantum mechanics to a physical problem, he also indicates that Turin's biggest flaw is his impatience. (In fact, Turin has already abandoned this work, moving on to a new project studying energy storage in cells.) Fascinating, though complex in its discussions of biology, chemistry, and physics, the book is also fun to read--the story of a maverick who had a great idea which no one takes seriously, at least not yet. Mary Whipple

The story of a Nobel prize winner in waiting taking on "the establishment of scent"
I was never any good at the theory of physics, biology and chemistry, but this book brought the fascination and excitement of all the practical science experiments back after reading a mere 10 pages. The book, written by an intrigued journalist, describes the story of Luca Turin, a lively Italian biophysicist then researching the olfactory sense (sense of smell).


The author uses the style of an investigative journalist detailing all his meetings with the key protagonists, the two fiercely opposed camps of Shape and Vibration. The Shapists - connotations about "form over function" are not entirely innocent - propagate the theory that our sense of smell is based on molecular shape recognition by our nasal smell receptors. The Shape theory of smell has to date dominated this field of research. The Vibration camp has Turin as its standard bearer. His original research posits that our olfactory sense is based on electron-tunnelling by the nasal smell receptors. The molecules we smell are analysed through a process of biological spectroscopy making use of an electron's natural tendency to tunnel through molecules carrying, in this case, an olfactory perception. The spectroscopy consists of the molecule being "smelled" by the tunnelling electron, and subsequently exhibiting a vibration pattern. The vibration can be represented by a wavelength. Hence, the olfactory bulb in our brain differentiates between smells by matching the resulting objective "olfactory" wavelengths with subjective smell perceptions. If accepted by the scientific community at large - and it is by no way today - Turin's Vibration theory could be worth a Nobel prize.


However, the author fails to give Turin his full credit. In the final chapter, he lists all the attempted interviews of Turin's rabid enemies, the Shapists. Their reaction, seemingly, is to ignore Turin and his theory and not to address the fundamental scientific proof he has put forward in support of Vibration. However, a lack of dialectical argumentation does not imply that the hypothesis posited is therefore true. Worse, Turin's reported current research activity outside his olfactory field of interest would suggest he has given up on establishing Vibration as the new (scientific) truth about smell. Somehow, more elaboration is needed.


This flaw in the book does, fortunately, not detract from the merits of reading about Turin's rather infectious obsession with science. A "touche-à-tout" with wide ranging interests, Turin is colourfully portrayed as a genius who can truly think outside the box, applying concepts laterally across different sciences. In the process, we see why Renaissance man or homo universalis is making a comeback. Specialist scientists, it seems, have become too narrow-minded to see the broader picture. I think it was Pascal who said that man will learn more and more about less and less until one day we will know all about nothing.


And if scientific flamboyance wasn't enough, Burr portrays also Turin the man - a voluble, occasionally narcissistic (I'm sure he checks reviews on Amazon), ever scientifically engrossed, idealistic, badly romancing, humoristic, stereotypical extrovert Italian. Turin's story was waiting to be told, and the book does not disappoint. I'm not big on science, but none of the drawings, none of the formulaic descriptions put me off from reading the book in record time. A thoroughly enjoyable and highly recommended read suitable for all.