The
Emperor of Scent
By Chandler Burr
Reviewed by
Kenny Brechner
Is it better to suffer by exertion or comparison? Anyone who has snowshoed up a mountain is aware of the value of following in someone else’s path. The same benefit applies to topical non-fiction. Suppose one has brought into being a book entitled To Freshen and Protect: The History of Toothpaste. The prospects for successful publication would be greatly enhanced if it were released in the wake of a best-selling novel, The Paste Chronicles, a fictionalized account of the toothpaste industry which the public had found riveting.
Chandler Burr’s new book, The Emperor of Scent: A Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the Senses, finds itself much in the same position as To Freshen and Protect, in that the public’s interest in this subject has been firmly established by Patrick Suskinds brilliant novel, Perfume. If The Emperor of Scent has been saved the labor of path breaking by Perfume, it is consigned therefore to suffer the burden of comparison with its benefactor. The book’s dust jacket attempts to put a positive spin on the comparison that The Emperor of Scent’s subject, Luca Turin, "has been compared to the hero of Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume, but his story is in fact stranger, because it is true."
The reader enters Burr’s pages with the hope that the comparison has more to stand on than the senile truism that ‘truth is stranger than fiction.’ Why should we think that truth is stranger than fiction, I mean to say.
What one finds is a concerted attempt by Burr to provide the reader with a prefabricated opinion, namely that the "trouble with science is that, as a rule, oddity among scientists-perfume obsessions, strange work habits-is often indistinguishable from inefficiency. What appears ludicrous and implausible and outrageous usually is. And then sometimes it’s not, the problem is telling the difference." The Emperor of Scent is presented as an account of an instance in which oddity produced genuine scientific truth but was improperly rejected as work of a "ludicrous and implausible and outrageous" character.
Though Luca Turin, real person and therefore stranger than a fictional person, is still alive, we will speak of him as the subject of a book, in the past tense I mean to say. Luca Turin had a gift for smell, of identifying the components of odors, which began as a hobby and ended as a scientific obsession, to explain the mystery of smell reception. Turin developed a theory of vibrational frequency to explain smell. After establishing that human olfactory receptors bound zinc ions Turin concluded that electron flow could be monitored to predict the human reception of smells based on a substance’s vibrational frequency. Turin argued that by using an isotope to change the vibrational frequency of a substance one could alter its smell without altering its shape, thereby proving his theory.
Turin’s paper, "A Spectroscopic Mechanism For Primary Olfactory Reception" was soundly rejected by the scientific community on various grounds. Burr, helped by plenty of quotes and emails from Turin and Turin’s colleague Walter Stewart, makes the case that the rejection was caused by the corrupt nature of the peer review process in which "big-shot silverback(s) get to see all the best stuff a year and a half before everyone else," and because "these were obviously people who didn’t want to see the theory published."
The idea that most stories
like Turin’s are really about crackpots but that this one is really about a
genius who was martyred by his uncanny resemblance to crackpots, is
energetically made but a tough sell. One understands that the scientific
community is essentially conservative in its digestive processes, yet one is
hard pressed to believe that big money and big egos are running quite so rampant
as Burr’s presentation demands. No human enterprise is perfect, however
Turin’s argument that "the only governing principle you can have for
scientific research is... Anything goes," is not very persuasive. There is
a word for a process operating without external filters, a mess I mean to say.
