Social Deodorization

AKA Life Without Body Odor, Coming Soon

Image credit: Space meditation, Bruce Rolff in Fine Art America, 2019

Life in the pits - Scientists identify the key enzyme behind body odor

Aug 2020, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2020-07-life-pits-scientists-key-enzyme.html

We already knew the bacterium Staphylococcus hominis was the culprit, but these researchers have identified the specific enzyme (C-T lyase) in the bacteria that turns our odorless sweat into body odor, or what scientists call thiolalcohol. So now we can create a model of that enzyme, and figure out how to deactivate it. 

There's not enough science fiction out there looking at a society without body odor. Just kidding, this is already reality. And what happens is, the people who don't smell still use deodorant, because the people who do smell have just enough spending power to sustain a global corporate personal hygiene complex so powerful it can influence you to deodorize yourself even if you have no odor in the first place. 

If you're interested in this sort of thing, soft paywall to the New York Times about Unilever's attempts to sell deodorant in China, "a market with 2.6 billion armpits" (2018).

via University of York and Unilever: The molecular basis of thioalcohol production in human body odour, Scientific Reports (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-68860-z

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-68860-z

Post Script:

The smell of your breath is a subset of body odor. 

Research reveals details of how salivary glands collectively produce constellation of proteins found in saliva

Nov 2020, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2020-11-reveals-salivary-glands-constellation-proteins.html

What's in your saliva? Here you go. They don't tell you what it smells like, but with this info you'll be halfway there. Also, "oral biofluid" is science for saliva.

Also, in case you were wondering, "cysteine-rich secretory protein 3 (CRISP3) ... is expressed by human labial glands."

via University at Buffalo: Marie Saitou et al. Functional Specialization of Human Salivary Glands and Origins of Proteins Intrinsic to Human Saliva. Cell Reports Volume 33 Issue 7, 108402, Nov 17, 2020. DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2020.108402

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2020.108402

Synthetic Tongue

Snakes, and many reptiles, have a split tongue because they smell with their tongue, and the two-tongues let them know which direction the smell is coming from. Humans, however, have split tongues because they want to. Tongue-splitting is a form of body modification.

In other news:

Researchers use a synthetic 'tongue' to sort out whiskies

Jun 2017, phys.org

“These synthetic "tongues" can highlight similarities between whiskies, but they can't identify an unknown whisky from scratch, he says, "You start with a sample that you know is the real McCoy. Then you look at another sample, and you can say whether it's the same sample or it's not." In other words, these tongues would be great for spotting counterfeits of expensive luxury whiskies.”

Note that this synthetic tongue cannot taste like we do. Well, first of all, note that taste and smell are very similar; Humans don’t smell with our tongues like snakes do, but most of what we “taste” is actually perceived by our nose. Nonetheless, this synthetic whisky tongue still does not work the same way as our perceptive apparatus. This tongue can only identify pre-determined patterns. You give it one flavor profile to ‘sense,’ and ask whether a new sample matches that or not. You can’t give it any old thing and ask “what is this?”

Perhaps the most amazing thing about our olfactory sensory apparatus is that it begins as a blank slate, with no hardwiring for any smells whatsoever. Everything we smell, and everything we can identify, we learn. If we want this synthetic whisky tongue to be able to identify a whisky from scratch, we need it to grow up like a little human, learning every single smell from scratch, just like us.

This is the same old story with all of these reverse-engineered smell-and-taste organs. They cannot be used to sense the way we do, where they are able to identify any combination of hundreds of thousands chemicals. Instead, they are given one job, to smell one thing, and they either smell it or they don’t. It’s like making an eye that is only for seeing the color red. Red or no red. It doesn’t know the Pantone catalog, only that one red.  Instead of choosing from the infinite answers to the question “what do you smell,” these prostheses can only choose from two possible answers, yes and no.

To program a truly synthetic tongue, or better, a synthetic nose, is still very, very far beyond our capacity. In the meantime, things will progress as they do; one piece at a time, dividing the human capacity for information-gathering into myriad discrete operations, and recreating ourselves through the fractured image of technology.

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