{"product_id":"the-emperor-of-scent-isbn-9780375759819","title":"The Emperor of Scent","description":"The \u003cb\u003eEmperor of Scent\u003c\/b\u003e tells of the scientific maverick Luca Turin, a connoisseur and something of an aesthete who wrote a bestselling perfume guide and bandied about an outrageous new theory on the human sense of smell. Drawing on cutting-edge work in biology, chemistry, and physics, Turin used his obsession with perfume and his eerie gift for smell to turn the cloistered worlds of the smell business and science upside down, leading to a solution to the last great mystery of the senses: how the nose works.\"A brilliant, feisty scientist at the center of a nasty, back-stabbing, utterly absorbing, cliff-hanging scramble for the Nobel Prize.  \u003cb\u003eThe Emperor of Scent\u003c\/b\u003e is a quirky, wonderful book.\"  \u003cbr\u003e-\u003cb\u003eJohn Berendt\u003c\/b\u003e, author of \u003cb\u003eMidnight in the Garden of Good and Evil\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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,\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Emperor of Scent\u003c\/b\u003e is an engrossing intellectual detective story about one iconoclast's quest to solve a centuries-old mystery--how smell works.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e-\u003cb\u003eMiles Harvey\u003c\/b\u003e, author of \u003cb\u003eThe Island of Lost Maps \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003cb\u003eThe Emperor of Scent\u003c\/b\u003e 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.\"\u003cbr\u003e-\u003cb\u003eAlexandra Fuller\u003c\/b\u003e, author of \u003cb\u003eDon't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“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 [of scent] once and for all? That’s what readers find out in this often funny, picaresque exposé of the closed world of whiffs, aromas and odors—and the people who study them.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e (starred review)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Exhibiting more grace than a magician in tails, Chandler Burr brings science and the people who practice it to life in The \u003cb\u003eEmperor of Scent\u003c\/b\u003e. . . . Burr does a remarkable job of explaining both Turin, the man behind the idea, and his science.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Denver Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“Chandler Burr . . . has transformed a chance meeting with a curious biophysicist named Luca Turin into an amusing and poetic adventure in science and art.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eChandler Burr\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of \u003ci\u003eA Separate Creation: The Search for the Biological Origins of Sexual Orientation.\u003c\/i\u003e He has contributed to \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e and has written for \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e, the \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times,\u003c\/i\u003e and other publications.\u003cb\u003eChapter 1\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eMystery\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStart with the deepest mystery of smell. No one knows how we do it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDespite everything, despite the billions the secretive giant\u003cbr\u003ecorporations of smell have riding on it and the powerful computers they\u003cbr\u003ethrow at it, despite the most powerful sorcery of their legions of\u003cbr\u003echemists and the years of toiling in the labs and all the famous\u003cbr\u003eneurowizardry aimed at mastering it, the exact way we smell\u003cbr\u003ethings–anything, crushed raspberry and mint, the subway at West\u003cbr\u003eFourteenth and Eighth, a newborn infant–remains a mystery. Luca Turin\u003cbr\u003ebegan with that mystery.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOr perhaps he began further back, with the perfumes. “The reason I got\u003cbr\u003einto this,” Turin will say, “is that I started collecting perfume. I’ve\u003cbr\u003eloved perfume from when I was a kid in Paris and Italy.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOr maybe (he’ll tell you another day, considering it from a different\u003cbr\u003eangle), maybe it was “because I’m French, at least by upbringing.\u003cbr\u003eFrenchmen will do things Anglo men won’t, and France is a country of\u003cbr\u003esmells. There’s something called pourriture noble. Noble rot. It’s a\u003cbr\u003efungus. It grows on grapes, draws the water out, concentrates the juice\u003cbr\u003ewonderfully, adds its own fungal flavor, and then you make wines like\u003cbr\u003ethe sweet Sauternes. Paradise. From rotten grapes. The idea that things\u003cbr\u003eshould be slightly dirty, overripe, slightly fecal is everywhere in\u003cbr\u003eFrance. They like rotten cheese and dirty sheets and unwashed women. Guy\u003cbr\u003eRobert is about seventy, a third-generation perfumer, lives in the south\u003cbr\u003eof France, used to work for International Flavors \u0026amp; Fragrances, created\u003cbr\u003eCalèche for Hermès. One day he asked me, ‘Est-ce que vous avez senti\u003cbr\u003esome molecule or other?’ And I said no, I’d never smelled it, what’d it\u003cbr\u003esmell like? And he considered this gravely and replied, ‘ça sent la\u003cbr\u003efemme qui se néglige.’ ” (It smells of the woman who neglects herself.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis makes him remember something, and he leans forward\u003cbr\u003eenthusiastically. “One of the stories I heard when I started meeting the\u003cbr\u003eperfumers and was let into their tightly closed world involves Jean\u003cbr\u003eCarles, one of the greatest perfume makers in Paris–he used to work for\u003cbr\u003eRoure in Grasse, near Nice, where all perfumes used to be made. He\u003cbr\u003ebecame anosmic, lost his sense of smell, and he simply carried on from\u003cbr\u003ememory, creating perfumes. Like Beethoven after his deafness. Jean\u003cbr\u003eCarles went on to create the great Ma Griffe for Carven, a result of\u003cbr\u003epure imagination in the complete absence of the relevant physical sense.\u003cbr\u003eCarles’s condition was known only to him and his son. When a client came\u003cbr\u003ein, he’d go through the motions, make a big show of smelling various\u003cbr\u003eingredients and, finally, the perfume he had created, which he would\u003cbr\u003epresent with great gravity to the client, smelling it and waving its\u003cbr\u003eodor around the room. And he couldn’t smell anything!” Turin smiles,\u003cbr\u003ethinking about it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe perfume obsession led Turin to write the perfume guide, which out of\u003cbr\u003ethe blue cracked open for him doors into the vast, secret world in which\u003cbr\u003eperfumes are created, and there he started noticing little things that\u003cbr\u003edidn’t make sense. A weird warp in official reality. Plus there were the\u003cbr\u003eother clues, the small pockets of strangeness he bumped into in the\u003cbr\u003escientific literature, carefully fitting these into the puzzle without\u003cbr\u003eeven realizing it, without (as he’d be the first to admit) really\u003cbr\u003eunderstanding what he was doing. And somewhere along the line, between\u003cbr\u003escouring the French Riviera for bottles of buried fragrances, pursuing\u003cbr\u003e(in his own very particular way) the strange triplets of biology and\u003cbr\u003echemistry and physics, and prowling the library’s remotest stacks,\u003cbr\u003erandomly sliding into things he found there–something that due to his\u003cbr\u003eintellectual promiscuity he does a lot of–somewhere Luca Turin got the\u003cbr\u003eidea of cracking smell. But it started with the mystery at smell’s\u003cbr\u003eheart, which is not only that we don’t know how we do it. We actually\u003cbr\u003eshouldn’t be able to smell at all.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom everything we know about evolution and molecular biology, smell\u003cbr\u003edoes the impossible. Look at two other systems inside your body, and\u003cbr\u003eyou’ll understand.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFirst, digestion. Human beings have evolved over millennia while eating\u003cbr\u003ecertain molecules–lipids and carbohydrates and proteins in the roots and\u003cbr\u003eberries and various unlucky animals we’ve gotten our hands on. The tiny\u003cbr\u003ecarbs and proteins are made of tinier atoms and molecules, and for your\u003cbr\u003ebody to burn them as various fuels, evolution has engineered a digestive\u003cbr\u003esystem for you. The system’s first task is to recognize which raw fuel\u003cbr\u003eit’s dealing with, so it can send out the right enzymes to break that\u003cbr\u003efuel down, process it for us. (Enzymes are catalysts, molecule\u003cbr\u003ewranglers, and every enzyme in every one of our cells–and there are tens\u003cbr\u003eof thousands of different enzymes–binds to a molecule and processes it.\u003cbr\u003eSome break molecules down, scrapping them to use their dismantled parts,\u003cbr\u003esome zip them together, and some rearrange them for the body’s own\u003cbr\u003epurposes.) But in every case the enzyme “recognizes” its molecule by\u003cbr\u003ethat molecule’s particular shape. Fat, thin, lumpy, rounded, oblong,\u003cbr\u003erectangular. The enzyme feels some cleft in some molecule, fits its\u003cbr\u003especial fingers into it like a key fits into a lock. And if the shape of\u003cbr\u003ethe lock and the shape of the key conform, bingo: Recognition! By shape.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd what gives a molecule its shape? We think of atoms as these\u003cbr\u003eperfectly symmetrical spheres, shining and frozen on labels of\u003cbr\u003e“Super-Strong!” kitchen cleaners, their electrons zipping around their\u003cbr\u003enuclei like perfectly spherical stainless-steel bracelets. Since\u003cbr\u003eelectrons move at close to the speed of light, if you filmed those\u003cbr\u003ecartoon atoms in motion you’d see a round electron membrane, a solid,\u003cbr\u003ebuzzing sphere made of blisteringly fast-moving electrons.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut that’s kitchen-cleaner labels. The skins of atoms are actually made\u003cbr\u003eof the paths of their outermost electrons, but not only don’t they zip\u003cbr\u003earound in perfectly circular orbits, they carve an almost infinite\u003cbr\u003evariety of 3-D orbital grooves around their nuclei. If that’s not\u003cbr\u003eenough, atoms get shoved against and glued to one another in molecules,\u003cbr\u003eforming bulbous structures, or nonspherical structures with disks and\u003cbr\u003eoblongs. Imagine taking the giant inflatable balloons in the Macy’s\u003cbr\u003eparade, each one shaped differently, and pushing them against one\u003cbr\u003eanother; their skins smoosh and warp, their bulbs and crevices contract\u003cbr\u003eand expand. So the electrons zip along in these new configurations, in\u003cbr\u003eelongated ellipses and valleys and sharp peaks and strange arcs. Which\u003cbr\u003emeans that each molecule creates a unique shape that an enzyme can\u003cbr\u003erecognize as precisely as a retinal scan.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn fact, molecular recognition is arguably the fundamental mechanism of\u003cbr\u003eall life, and it is based on this single, universal principle: Shape.\u003cbr\u003eReceptor cells from your head to your glands and skin recognize enzymes,\u003cbr\u003ehormones, and neurotransmitters by their molecular shapes. The only\u003cbr\u003evariable is time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe thing about enzymes is that evolution has learned over millennia\u003cbr\u003ethat you’re going to need to digest (break down, make up, or molecularly\u003cbr\u003erearrange) certain things–wild almonds and crab apples and dead\u003cbr\u003esquirrels (sugars, fats, and proteins)–and not others–raw petroleum or\u003cbr\u003esand or silicate (fluorocarbons and borazines). So evolution has by now\u003cbr\u003eselected for you a complete, fixed genetic library of enzymes that will\u003cbr\u003ebind to and deal with a fixed list of molecules. (It’s not an exact\u003cbr\u003eone-to-one enzyme-to-foodstuff ratio, but it’s precise enough that it’s\u003cbr\u003ewhy your dog famously can’t digest chocolate, a culinary product his\u003cbr\u003ewolf ancestors never ate: evolution never selected for dogs an enzyme\u003cbr\u003ethat recognized the shape of chocolate’s molecules, so if you feed them\u003cbr\u003ethese molecules, they get sick.) And if just one enzyme is missing, you\u003cbr\u003eend up with nasty, sometimes lethal, diseases and disorders. You can\u003cbr\u003edump the squirrels for terrine de lapin et petits légumes, it doesn’t\u003cbr\u003ematter: it’s the same lipids and proteins in your library, and as long\u003cbr\u003eas you don’t eat, say, plastic, for which you have no enzyme, your\u003cbr\u003edigestive system happily recognizes the molecules you consume, be it\u003cbr\u003eMcDonald’s or the fifth course at the Clifton Inn. The thing to remember\u003cbr\u003ehere, however, is time: enzymes stand ready to identify the right\u003cbr\u003emolecule instantly.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor contrast, take the immune system. Antibodies are designed (they have\u003cbr\u003eto be) to bind to things that weren’t around our ancestors, unknown\u003cbr\u003ebacteria and foreign parasites and each year’s new, nastier, mutated\u003cbr\u003eviruses we’ve never seen before. Your visual system can recognize things\u003cbr\u003ethat weren’t in Homo sapiens’s evolutionary environment, like Ferraris\u003cbr\u003eand Star Wars and Barbra Streisand, and so can your immune system, but\u003cbr\u003eyour visual system deciphers photon wavelengths while your immune system\u003cbr\u003eis feeling out molecules’ shapes. Here’s the difference. When it\u003cbr\u003eencounters a new virus, the immune system starts rapidly rearranging\u003cbr\u003egenes at random, spewing out antibodies until it hits on one that fits\u003cbr\u003ethe invader’s shape, binds to it, and destroys it. (It’s the exact\u003cbr\u003eopposite of a “fixed library” idea; Susumu Tonegawa of MIT won a 1987\u003cbr\u003eNobel Prize for figuring this out.) So that’s why you’re at home for a\u003cbr\u003efew days with the flu. Your immune system needs time to break the\u003cbr\u003einvader’s shape code and produce the shape weapon to fight it. Where the\u003cbr\u003edigestive system is limited but instant, the immune system is\u003cbr\u003eunlimited–it “takes all comers”; but it also takes time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut here is the problem. Someone hands you a molecule called a borane.\u003cbr\u003eYou lift it to your nose. And without fail, you smell it. There’s just\u003cbr\u003eone catch: boranes were created by inorganic chemists at the beginning\u003cbr\u003eof the twentieth century and never existed in the ancestral environment\u003cbr\u003eof any human being. Yet we smell them. This is impossible.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe fact is that we have never found any molecule in the smellable size\u003cbr\u003erange that we could not smell instantly. This is the mystery of smell.\u003cbr\u003eYou smell boranes instantly, not in a few days or weeks, even though you\u003cbr\u003ecannot have an evolutionarily selected receptor molecule for their\u003cbr\u003eunique shape. Smell is unlimited, like the immune system, and yet it is\u003cbr\u003einstant, like the digestive system. And everything we know about Shape\u003cbr\u003eand molecular recognition says this should be impossible.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe understand the human sense of vision intimately, down to exactly\u003cbr\u003ewhich vibration of a particle of light caught in the vision receptor in\u003cbr\u003ethe retina will make us see exactly which color (a 1967 Nobel given for\u003cbr\u003evision). We know hearing in exquisite detail, can predict with absolute\u003cbr\u003eaccuracy which air vibration in the cochlea will create what tone (a\u003cbr\u003e1961 Nobel for hearing). But of smell, we do not know, cannot predict.\u003cbr\u003eThis is why smell is the object of two cut-throat races.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe first is scientific. This all-out race is being run in some of the\u003cbr\u003emost powerful labs (by the most competitive researchers with the biggest\u003cbr\u003eegos). The prize is the unscrambling of one of the most important\u003cbr\u003esecrets of biology, not to mention (everyone is betting on this) a Nobel\u003cbr\u003ePrize. An astounding 1 percent of human genes, we recently discovered,\u003cbr\u003eare devoted to olfaction. “So smell must be incredibly important for\u003cbr\u003eus,” notes NIH geneticist Dean Hamer, “to devote so much of our DNA to\u003cbr\u003eit. The only comparable system–and this was the big surprise to\u003cbr\u003eeveryone–is the immune system, and we all know why it’s important to\u003cbr\u003efight off invaders. This says smell was central in our evolution in a\u003cbr\u003eway that, presently, we don’t really understand.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe other race is for money. Approximately $20 billion is generated\u003cbr\u003eevery year by industrially manufactured smells, and virtually all these\u003cbr\u003esmells are made by only seven companies, the Big Boys, which split the\u003cbr\u003ebillions among themselves. The Big Boys shroud themselves in secrecy to\u003cbr\u003eprotect the public brand image of their clients. They make the molecules\u003cbr\u003ethat you associate with the smells of Tide laundry detergent, Clorox\u003cbr\u003ebleach, and Palmolive soap, but they are also the actual creators of the\u003cbr\u003esuperexpensive fragrances sold under the rarefied labels Calvin Klein\u003cbr\u003eand Chanel and L’Oréal, Miyake and Armani. The creation of a single\u003cbr\u003ecommercially successful fragrance molecule represents tens of millions\u003cbr\u003eof dollars, and the Big Boys employ an army of chemists tasked with\u003cbr\u003ecreating them. The way to create them is the magic formula.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is why Luca Turin’s theory is as important as it is unknown. It is\u003cbr\u003enot only a new theory of smell. Financially, it implies a technology\u003cbr\u003ethat threatens thousands of engineers and corporate executives, the\u003cbr\u003einvestment of billions of dollars, and the industrial structures of\u003cbr\u003emassive corporations in North America, Europe, and Japan.\u003cbr\u003eScientifically, it is a wildly revolutionary proposal contradicting a\u003cbr\u003euniversal, bedrock assumption of biology–Shape–and positing an\u003cbr\u003eastounding, microscopic electrical mechanism that operates inside the\u003cbr\u003ehuman body and is made of human flesh. You might as well, fumed one\u003cbr\u003efurious scientist who heard about Turin’s idea, propose a new theory of\u003cbr\u003edigestion through tiny nuclear reactors in people’s stomachs. Perhaps\u003cbr\u003ethe only thing odder than the theory is the story of how Turin actually\u003cbr\u003ecame up with it, and then of what happened to him when he did, which is\u003cbr\u003ewhat this book is about.[quote]--John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304083181797,"sku":"NP9780375759819","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375759819.jpg?v=1767739163","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-emperor-of-scent-isbn-9780375759819","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}