Mapping delight

One of my best friends is addicted to the sweetest, most sumptuous smells you could imagine. She does not pick a cosmetic unless it is fruit-flavored or smells of food she loves. When we travel together, we assume a caravan of bottled, canned sprays of sensuous smells. She does not just get an array of lotions, body wash and oils for herself; she also gets those “flavors” for her son who is in grade school. In a story that sent us, her friends, laughing breathless, she told us that her son who is also my godson, came home from school once and sat her down to make a serious request. He said, “Mama, please do not spray that sweet apple scented cologne on me anymore because the bees in the cafeteria have started to chase me.” She stopped putting apple-scented cologne on him but I would not be surprised if she just switched him to another fruit scent.

I think the industry that survives on the passion for scents of people like my friend know that their jobs may soon become even easier. Last May, in a breakthrough study published in the journal Nature Methods, scientists from the Weizmann Institute have created a map for various odors which originally was for 250 kinds and had 1,600 chemical characteristics for each. They eventually narrowed the list down to 40 odors. But what makes it a more meaningful map is that they went further to see how the brain would recognize these odors. As it turns out, the brain produces a pattern depending on the odor and the studies revealed that the closer the two smells are in the map they initially made, the more similar the neural pattern they evoked. Your brain echoes the degrees of kinship of odor molecules.

Among all our senses, smell is the most evocative of our emotions. This is because the olfactory nest sits on the parts of our brain that also cradle our emotional memories. This means that the familiar scent of a loved one who has long gone can make you cry faster and deeper than seeing his or her photograph can. Smelling goes deep, and in this case, faster than light. This is why some could not rearrange his or her closet even years after.

The mapping of scents goes beyond just the pleasure of knowing that “smells” can be located. The scientists say that these smells could eventually be digitized to be transmitted via some kind of scent-mail. When that happens, I think I should warn my godson because bees will soon also be in their house.

Smells are not the only ones being mapped lately. The chocolate genome (the map of the genes that makes chocolate the most sumptuous thing in the universe) is also being mapped by who else, but the Mars company with the US Department of Agriculture and IBM. The wondrous cocoa tree will be stripped to its DNA identity to make sure we know what makes it tick and therefore, enable chocolate makers to assure a world filled with chocolate even if climate change causes all of ice in the poles to melt and drown all cocoa forests. And from the bottom of the heart of a chocoholic like me — I plead with these chocolate gene cartographers to make sure they never miss a gene.

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