From "II Creation." Turin can nail any odor descriptively in a few words.

If Luca Turin collected you at London's Euston Square tube station, he would lead the way enthusiastically down Gower Street to the biology building at University College London. If this was back when he was teaching there, when things were simpler, he'd take you up a large wooden stairwell and into his old office. The office, during his occupancy, looked like a hand-grenade test site. Transistors, wires, tubes, plane tickets, bottles of perfume, obscure scientific journals and copies of Vogue and magazines about airplanes, gadgets of every size and design, and God knows what else, and, everywhere, vials and vials and vials. Turin would dive in and begin selecting vials from among the hundreds spread out chaotically on counters. Each would contain a single kind of molecule. Each would have a single smell.

Turin can nail any odor descriptively in a few words. He's generally not only exactly spot on, he gets incredible torque from the most recherché nouns. (His descriptions are almost entirely in the nominative; he uses adjectives rarely to never.) He screws off a cap, pushes over a molecule, and you look at the label: "cis-3-hexenol." Cautiously your nose goes to the tiny opening of the dark, little bottle, shoulders tensed as if rounding a corner in a tight, dark space, eyes narrowed. "Cut grass," says Turin, watching you. Two words, definitive. You sniff. The molecule cis-3-hexenol happens to smell-it is impossible to describe it any other way-exactly like cut grass, and very strongly. He picks up benzonitrile. "Shoe polish." This structure of atoms smells overwhelmingly reminiscent of round metal tins of Kiwi shoe polish. He stands a foot away, looking intently down at you-he's around six foot three, gangly frame, looks paradigmatically northern Italian (which he is), light brown hair receding in wisps from a Gianni Versace face that's large and open and animated-and as you gingerly draw some molecule from the vial up into your nose states, "Scrambled egg, gasoline." You're smelling the smell, it's filling your mind with a vague, inchoate presence. And the instant he says the words the smell snaps into concreteness, into realness, and the smell of scrambled eggs with gasoline is precisely, bizarrely, the smell filling you. (Turin speaks a grammatically perfect, highly inflected English, quite rapidly, with a totally American accent although he learned English in Britain and lives in London. So why the American accent. "I don't know." He shrugs. "I guess because I'd've had to decide which English accent, which is a major pain in the ass, given what that means here. The hell with it." On the other hand, he uses British syllabic emphasis on words like laboratory-accent on the second syllable-and aluminium-the third-which, combined with the American accent, can produce an odd effect. Words in French and Italian, his two native languages, he invariably renders with their native pronunciations, as he does with Russian, which he speaks a little. Every so often, the faintest foreignness will appear in his English, generally as a slightly swallowed consonant; when he says "Fantastic!" which he does often, it sounds Dutch.)

"It makes everyone nervous, smelling," he says re the vial, "because smell is such a strong sense." Turin gives talks on smell to scientific audiences, and the squeamish reaction pisses him off. The intellectual squeamishness, too. "People will say, 'But isn't smell totally subjective?' And I'll say 'What the hell does that mean?' It's not more subjective than color or sound. Real men and scientists feel slightly ridiculous smelling something. I'll say 'Let me show you some smells,' and I start passing out vials and everyone titters, like I've just asked them to take off their clothes or something. It's at the heart of the research problem, because experts on the biology of smell will put vanillin under 'herbal.' God. When I wrote the perfume guide, most of my readers were gay men, and most of my acquaintances assumed I was gay, which I'm not, not that I give a damn. Real men don't smell things. It's a female thing.

"For a perfumer there is no bad smell. All the great French perfumes, every last one, has some ingredient in it that is repulsive, like civet, this hideous and ferociously powerful extract from the butthole of a Chinese tomcat. Beaver pelt oil. Something. Americans dedicate their lives to the notion that shit shouldn't stink. American perfumery is really, well . . . Americans have an obsessional neurosis about being clean. What do you call that?"

He thinks of something strange, mulls it over. "You know, there's an aspect of smell that seems to be missing from the other senses. When you hear a piece of music, you can identify the composer, or if it is derivative, the composer's main influences, by name. 'That's Bizet, that's Glass.' When you see a painting, you can do the same. 'Oh, Miró.' But when you experience a famous work of smell-Chanel No. 5, Shalimar, Charlie, CK One, Opium-though a number of them have actually been designed by the same perfumer, you can never identify their creator. There is no 'signature' in perfumes."

He picks up a group of vials. "OK, these are great. Oxane." He pauses and says, "Sweaty mango." You smell it. It is, exactly, hot sweat on ripe mango. He grins, goes on, "That's a single synthetic molecule they manufactured in a lab, a six-membered ring with an Oxygen and a Sulfur: phenomenal power. I heard the Quest chemists once accidentally dropped a hundred grams down the drain, and all of Kent smelled of mango for a few hours. The odor is a shimmering mixture of sweat and tropical fruit, with a 'green' marijuana-like note. Used in perfumery much as trombones in the orchestra, imparting an edge and rich bloom to virtually any composition.

"Vertelon: mushroom liqueur. Again, this complex odor you're smelling is a single molecule. Mushrooms are at once clean and dirty; it's a creature freshly born of decay. Vertelon clears a perfume, like when you pour paraffin oil on an opaque sheet of paper and watch as the paper becomes translucent. I am at present working on a mushroom-Oriental that will smell of sex, but clean sex.

"Gardamide: grapefruit and hot horses. This is the horse you get from removing the saddle after riding.

"Violet nitrile: steel cucumber. Aldehyde HC=O groups can be replaced with nitriles, which are CNs." He sniffs this for himself, just to see. Thinks about it. Sets it aside and opens the next one.

"Cashmeran, a pure synthetic. Technically classed as a musk, it is actually a peculiar combination of a transparent sweet note with no precise character, a musty, wet-concrete note with camphorlike feel, and a fruity, blackberries note that pops in and out of focus. You just cannot believe that a single molecule has so many features. The musty, wet-concrete. The camphor. The fruit. The velvet. Smell that? Getting this molecule in your nose is like coming up close to a beautiful face and finding it's made of independently 'wrong' features that add up to a fine harmony.

"Tuberose: black rubber flower. This is a natural oil, a complex mixture. This one's smell evolves. The rubber is kinky, dusted with talcum. Then an almost meaty bloodlike smell reminiscent of carnations, and finally a 'white flower.' " He pauses. Smiles. "Decorous but unquestionably poisonous. Fracas, the classic Piguet fragrance created by Germaine Cellier, was very close but made of different pieces. Bear in mind," he notes, "this is several hundred molecules flying in tight formation."....