Book Review: The Emperor of Scent : A Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the Senses by Chandler Burr
This is an entertaining and informative story of how a failed class of theories that tried to explain smell as purely shape recognition have been challenged by a theory that involves detecting the vibrational frequencies of bonds.
Burr does a very good job of making some rather technical discussions of chemistry readable and accurate without intimidating amateurs. The story is enjoyable except when reporting the ugly side of academic and corporate politics. The extent to which he claims that researchers who have based careers on the failed approach to smell refuse to think about the vibrational theory seems rather extreme. Yet I can only find one instance in which Burr unfairly criticizes one of those researchers (on page 233, when he says it’s strange not to know what “the same vibration” means, and implies that “same” simply means an identical integer number of nanometers. Yet it would be strange if vibrations had an integer number of an arbitrary unit such as nanometers, and on page 64 Burr implies that vibrating at 2550 nanometers is the same as 2500 nanometers).
One other incidental comment the book makes about the peer review process is worth repeating. One of the reasons that big name research labs continue producing good results is that they have an advantage comparable to insider trading as a result of seeing papers at the peer review stage, while the average lab has to wait longer to get the same ideas.