I love watching TED, it's interesting how often you come across something that links with an idea that was forming in your mind, or with other things you happen to be reading. Speaking of which it's TED 2009 this week. I'd love to be there.
Picking up the trail on other people's work on vibration, fascinates me. Luca Turin's talk on 'the science of scent' sparks a number of thoughts. Luca explored how we actually register smell?
This is still a controversial area with a handful of competing theories. The shape model has it that it is to do with molecular shape - the lock and key mechanism. Luca's work, inspired work of Wright and Dyson, however set out to demonstrate that smell worked by vibration and not shape. That each molecule, and the bonds connecting them, responsible for a smell - such as cut grass - vibrated at it's own unique frequency. (And that frequency can be translated into audible range as a note). This was interesting enough in itself as I've always thought that colours sing - that would be one of my ways of describing them, each with a different tune. Smells are often described as having a note. This is not to say that shape isn't important in smell but Luca's theory is that smell is not a consequence of shape alone or even primarily.
Luca was able to demonstrate his theory when he left academia and set up a company "putting someone else's money where my mouth was" to work for industry developing fragrance and flavours. A French perfumer set him the challenge of finding a compound that smelt like coumarin. Coumarin is a sweet hay-like, tobacco smell, very important and popular in perfume (and so financially valuable) but actual coumarin is toxic and can't be used as I guess eroding your customer-base over time is not much good for business. Undaunted, they profiled coumarin -that is analysed its vibrational spectrum- and set about finding a match. They found one after just three weeks - virtually unknown. Quite a different shape, but an almost perfect match on vibrational frequency and the same sweet tobacco scent.
" When you're a scientist you're always selling ideas, people are very resistant to ideas .. when you put a 10 gm vial on the table and it smells like coumarin and it isn't coumarin, and you found it in three weeks, this focuses everybody's minds wonderfully."
A great story and well worth a watch.
Watching it leaves me with several thoughts;
1) Connected to the vibrational theory - how does this connect to or intersect the work of other researchers or traditions, on vibrational theory such as Candace Pert, Helen Langevin,Traditional Chinese Medicine, which in turn has interesting connections with the Patricia Kane's biomedical work, this touches on our understanding of our communication systems - what are the opportunities for medicine, industry and biomimicry.
2) This is more about mindset and the process of creativity and innovation itself. When I studied science the shape theory was presented as an accepted and complete'ish picture. In both education and innovation how do we leave the door open for what we don't yet know in order for us to think more creatively about solutions and the way stuff works. Generally we like black and white pictures rather than probables, but the trouble is this does tend to fix our way of seeing, to keep on thinking the world is flat. Prescription education based on standardised testing can only reinforce prescriptive standard thinking and carry the culture over to the workplace.
3) Linked to this is the importance of language and metaphor in building pictures in keeping the door open. When we use metaphors - and still pictures of lock and key it starts to fix in our minds how we think stuff is working. When we describe the immune system as defence, we start to interpret its behaviour within that context, as well as then compartmentalise function. Much of our language in medicine and business is often war-like and compartmentalised, rather than collaborative and networked - though much of this is changing now with our digital landscape as we recognise the power of networks and collaboration in both science and business.
These are huge subjects in themselves, but I'd quite like to think aloud on them some other posts. Luca Turin is also involved in an interesting DARPA research project on scent detection, more on that later too.
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