A Study in Contrasts

Last week I attended the Association for Chemoreception Sciences meeting in St. Petersburg, FL. Today I gave a talk to the American Rhinologic Society in Las Vegas. The difference is enough to make one’s head spin.

The biggest contrast is the dress code. AChemS, like most academic science meetings, is casual in the extreme. Graduate students (and post-docs who aren’t actively seeking faculty positions) wear cargo shorts with T-shirts or Gap-ish women’s wear. Atrocious sandals are popular (Birkenstocks signal that you’re a field person). Sandals can be worn with socks if you are from Europe or if you already have tenure. (Full disclosure: your humble Blog Proprietor has worn Sperry Top Siders since he was sixteen.) Casualness is not a function of the beach-side meeting site—trust me on this.

The ARS is a medical society; the crowd is almost exclusively rhinologists and otolaryngologists. The men wear suits and ties, the ladies dresses or tailored suits. No shorts. No sandals. No exceptions. And this is Las Vegas, where anything goes.

Score one for the medicos.

Another contrast is scientific style. The posters look pretty much like those in academic science, but the graphics are, well, really graphic: color photos of a neck reconstruction, a resection of an extracranial skull base tumor, and neck dissection for metastatic thyroid cancer. Attendees were strolling the poster aisle with plates from the lunch buffet. Not having gone to med school, I wasn’t up to nibbling on a pulled-pork sandwich while viewing this stuff. These guys are hard core.

Score another for the scalpel team.

The talks were short (six minutes) and emphasized summaries and conclusions over methods and statistical analysis. Reasonable for a crowd interesting in evaluating newer and better treatment techniques. Disappointingly, most of the presenters just read their Powerpoint slides. Yawn.

Draw.

The exhibitor section was mind-blowing. Every manner of medical instrument for reaching up the human nose, including endoscopic probes that provide a video feed as the doctor clips off polyps or bores into sinuses remotely. Cool. I’ve haven’t seen this many plastic skulls and life-like rubber face models on the counter since the Halloween superstore closed for the season. (Cronenberg fans will recall Dead Ringers.)

Score one for hi-tech medical devices.

In the end the docs take it on points; but I still prefer the messy, contentious style of basic science. It’s a temperment thing; if I were a clinician I’d want to be up on the latest tools and techniques. But I never was a “hands” guy in the lab.

. . .

So I’m blogging from McCarran airport which has free WiFi. (Sweet!) However I’m more than ready to fly away. This is my first visit to Las Vegas and it hasn’t moved me. I feel like I’ve had a low-grade brain fever since I walked off the plane. Don’t get me wrong—the locals are pleasant, the staff at Bally’s were fine, but . . . the whole experience is a bit too virtual for my taste.

Some of it is real: the nostalgic smell of fresh, indoor cigarette smoke, the whiskey voices and nicotine laughs of the craps players. Western types with their hard R’s. But this is Disneyland for grownups with wagering. I’ll stick with the Dumbo ride in Anaheim.

Lieder Ohne Düfte

Felix Mendelssohn wrote Songs without Words. Now olfactory artist Sissel Tolaas has gone one better and written a magazine without words—but with scents. The publisher is the German art & culture periodical Mono.Kultur. 

According to M.K, Tolaas “curated” the dozen microencapsulated smells presented in the Spring 2010 issue. (That’s art-speak for “selected”.) They also tell us that

Tolaas has become an expert on everything related to scents, odours, smells.

Everything?

She is a professor at Harvard University for invisible communication

Of course she is. And I’m the Jedi Master of Invisible Psychology and Totally Transparent Kung-fu.

Sissel Tolaas: too kühl 4 skool.

Point-and-Click Psychophysics

Poster sessions at scientific meetings are a strange ritual. The idea is simple enough: the presenter pins a poster describing his work to a big easel and stands there for a few hours talking about it to whomever stops by and displays (even an iota of) interest. The posters themselves look a lot better than they did when I was in grad school; they are laser printed in color on a single piece of glossy paper. Back in the day they were literally cut-and-paste jobs that required a lot of stick pins.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the social awkwardness of the poster session. Big name presenters are mobbed; the unknown post-doc with a hot result might get some attention; an incremental advance in a fringe area will attract maybe three people in an entire morning. Call it a sympathy viewing.

Negotiating the poster session floor is hazardous. Pause too long in front of one and you may trigger an unsolicited offer to “talk you through” the poster. A one-minute once-over is welcome; one can always ask for more information. But watch out for the obsessive (or novice) presenter for whom each detail is precious and for whom time has no meaning. It’s not easy to politely extract oneself from the minutiae geek. 

At the AChemS meeting I work the floor with a list of posters I want to see. New findings are the currency of the realm, but I’m also looking for new experimental techniques: ways of observing or quantifying perception that are easy to use and give robust results.

I found one at Barry Green’s poster “Measuring referral of retronasal odors: The effect of taste.” Barry was once a colleague of mine at the Monell Chemical Senses Center; he now works at the John B. Pierce Laboratory at Yale. He’s a hard-core psychophysicist devoted to measuring sensation and perception in various sensory modalities. His poster grabbed my attention because it involved the interaction of smell and taste. (Retronasal olfaction is odor perceived from food or drink in the mouth; things smelled from within rather than from without.)

In the study, each subject held 5 ml of liquid in his mouth for three seconds then spit it out. He spent the next five seconds paying attention to where in his mouth and/or nose he smelled an odor. (The solutions contained various combinations and concentrations of salt, sugar, citral and vanillin.) A computer screen displayed an anatomical cartoon of a human head with nose, mouth, tongue and palate. The volunteer’s task was to color in the location of the odor using a mouse and Microsoft Paint.

That alone is so cool—an intuitive way for people to tell you where they are experiencing a retronasal smell. No vocabulary (soft palate, nasopharynx, etc.); no number scales; just “show me.” Easier than Etch A Sketch.

So what did Barry find? In a nutshell, odors presented in a water solution are localized equally often to the nose and mouth. When the solution is sweetened with sucrose, the odor is perceived closer to the tongue. Adding salt to the solution doesn’t produce this effect. This adds to our recently expanding knowledge of smell and taste interactions, but to my mind the innovation in measurement technique is the best part.

The Smelly Web Indexes: Full Flower

The Solo Blog Index

Close: 103
Change: +3
Big movers: JaimeLeParfum +13%, PinkManhattan +9%, GrainDeMusc +7%, BitterGraceNotes +7%, Ayalasmellyblog +6%, MaisQuePerfume -10%, SorceryOfScent -8%, FirstNerve -8%,  AnyasGarden -5%,

The Team Blog Index
Close: 112
Change: -1 
Big movers: none

The Corporate & Community Site Index
Close: 48
Change: +6 
Big movers: TheDryDown +6%

Summary
The Solo Blog Index continued to climb with a 3-point rise although declines outnumbered advances two to one.  FirstNerve snapped its totally awesome unprecedented streak of fifteen straight weekly gains with a drop. We blame the short-sellers and call for global controls on smelly web traffic.

The Team Blog Index was again off one point, but the Corporate & Community Site Index followed last weeks five point rise with a six point gain, with TheDryDown leading the way.

Live from AChemS – More on Sperm & Lily of the Valley

One of the advantages of a scientific conference is that you hear results straight from the horse’s mouth. Two weeks ago I wrote about the discovery of the first molecule to which men are more sensitive than women. It’s called bourgeonal and its odor character resembles lily of the valley. Two other remarkable facts about bourgeonal: it is extremely attractive to human sperm and it activates olfactory receptor OR1D2 which is expressed in sperm cells as well as the human nose.

In a comment, Carmencanada at GrainDeMusc said:

Lily of the valley is not a smell I would have associated with human reproduction. Does that mean Diorissimo and the like would attract the, hm, hm, little fellows?

I too was puzzled by why an intensely floral odor would have a role in mammalian reproduction.

At this evening’s poster session Matthias Laska, a co-author of the new paper, presented his study and I got a chance to ask him about bourgeonal. I learned a few new things.

According to Laska, bourgeonal does not occur in the female reproductive tract or anywhere else in nature for that matter. The German scientist Hanns Hatt discovered that bourgeonal activates testicular odor receptors; he and his team published the results in Science in 2003. They were using a cocktail of 100 natural and synthetic odorants to screen for receptor activation and bourgeonal was one of the hundred.

So, yes Carmencanada, your suspicions were correct. There’s no biological logic to bourgeonal’s potency as a sperm attractant. (In the original post I took the fact that it works in laboratory experiments to mean it is naturally released by the egg; sorry about that.) There may, in fact, be other odors even more effective at attracting sperm than bourgeonal—we just haven’t found them yet.

Laska also reminded me that Hatt had applied for a patent on the human odor receptor in question as well as molecules that stimulate or inhibit it. Claim 23 of the patent is for medical applications involving contraception or fertility enhancement. Lily of the valley—coming soon to a fertility clinic near you! 

Hatt has become something of an evangelist for the fundamental biological role of bourgeonal in human evolution. He recently published a book (available only in German) called The lily of the valley phenomenon: All about smell and how it affects our lives.

And that, boyz & girlz, is why it’s worth going to poster sessions.