Chandler Burr: Emperor of Scent

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

The emperor of the title is Luca Turin, an Italian-French scientist the American journalist Burr met by happy accident when the Eurostar was 20 minutes late leaving Paris for London one day in 1998.

By the time they arrived in London, Turin's home, Burr knew he had a story - a piece for the Atlantic, he thought. But after several years of tracking Turin, he knew he had much more: a book, and a terrific one at that, not only the story of a fascinating, bawdy, arrogant free-thinker, but a much broader tale of what happens when scientific discovery meets scientific orthodoxy.

What kind of scientist is Turin? Well, that's the point in a way, as Turin is a scientific polyglot, an intellectual arbitrageur. Officially a biologist, he "has always been interested in everything".

"I'm reading chemistry books at night for the heck of it, physics in the morning. I find that physics is like oysters - it's best first thing in the morning - so I always have these physics books in the loo".

Most significantly, Turin also has an obsession with smell, and a poetic, precise ability to "translate smells into the metaphors of language". This evolved, as he wrote a guide to perfume, into a radical new theory of how we smell.

Because, it turns out, the mechanics of smell, and "the paradox that smell is both instant and yet unlimited", is a deep mystery.

There are theories, of course, and the predominant one is that receptors in our nasal membranes "recognise" different molecular shapes.

However, after publishing his astonishingly acute Parfums: Le Guide in 1992, Turin was invited into the realm and laboratories of the Big Boys, the handful of corporations who control the perfume industries, everything from toilet cleaners to Chanel No 5.

There it dawned on him that the Shape theory could not predict the smell of substances, and led to enormous waste of time and money in the perfume industry. For instance, a team of fragrance chemists at Quest (one of the Big Boys) could produce between 500 and 2000 new molecules each year, of which maybe 20 were sufficiently interesting to be used.

Puzzling over this, in 1993 "a thousand irrelevant facts converged in an instant" and Turin began working on another theory of smell, developing and expanding on a theory advanced by a "madman" and dismissed back in 1938. It was that our noses somehow have the spectroscopic power to detect vibration.

The ensuing story is absolutely riveting, as Turin devises experiment after experiment to "prove" his Vibration theory by having it seriously considered by his scientific peers, only to face rejection after rejection, notably from scientific journal Nature.

Burr seems to be beside Turin every step of the way, and admits to having had a rough road at times from a man who, we quickly understand, could be impossibly difficult. Yet Burr sticks with his subject, as we breathlessly stick with Burr through every stage, sharing the outrage at the science establishment's intransigence and conservatism.

Vested interests? You bet. The failure of the scientific process? Well, that's what Burr and Turin believe.

"So basically, if he's right, he's a genius and we're all assholes working on garbage. Right?" says one icy Shapist.

As Burr says, there is another side to this story, but he had absolutely no luck in "gaining access" to it. He couldn't even find any Shapists who had read Turin's paper on the Vibration theory, although they all opposed it.

In and around this story of "scientific corruption" though is the poetry and enigma of smell itself, told with grace, colour and verve.

Turin is a wonderful subject, incapable of a dull sentence. One's taste in smell, he maintains, is part-biology and part-culture, and to illustrate he imagines the different responses to a cheese he himself describes as "rare and heavenly", the ultra-stinky soumaintrain.

"Americans think 'Good god!' The Japanese think, 'I must now commit suicide'. The French think, 'Where's the bread?'."

Heinemann, $40