Tuesday, October 05, 2004


Too often have I gone through my day blissfully imagining that I was a little closer to understanding life, the universe, and everything.  Then, inevitably, as I learn something new I realize that I never understood some of the things I thought I knew.

One of the latest Nobel Prizes awarded (for medicine) was just awarded to two Americans, Richard Axel and Linda Buck, for discovering how our sense of smell works.

If you are anything like me, your ears perked up and you thought, "Whatever do you mean?  We already know how the sense of smell works.  You can't very well discover something twice, now can you?  Well, I suppose a goldfish might..."

I've been running around thinking I knew how I was smelling things like a pompous oaf when I really had no idea.  I feel so ashamed.

Our ability to detect and distinguish between 10,000 odors is controlled by a huge gene family of "odor receptors."

Amazing.  This actually rocks my little world a bit.  I thought our noses worked like our eyes.  Then I saw "What the Bleep Do We Know" and I learned that eyes don't work quite the way I thought they did.  Now I find out about these odor genes and the way they function reminds me of our eyes.

We have genes to detect certain smells.  Thus, what we smell depends on our genes.  So it's possible that there are smells out there that we can't detect.  This upsets me.  If there is something that smells better than freshly-baked brownies and I can't smell it I am going to be pissed.

Oh, some other Nobel Prize winners figured out Strong Force.  It was quarks all along.  Who knew?

2 comments:

  1. and what if there are some colours you can't see. like some smells you can't smell? is that genetic too??

    men always complain that peach, pumpkin, plum and wine can't work as names for colours...
    what decides the ken of our vision, then?

    ReplyDelete

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