Merck, Pfizer, Rhone-Poulenc, Bayer, and Eli Lilly vs. Givaudan, Quest, IFF, Ferminich, and Takasago. I regretted cutting this section of scene from the "India" chapter for space reasons and am glad to be able to give it to you here. (Once again: This is technical information, and it will not make sense without context from the book.) Given entirely in Turin's words, this is (with the aforementioned caveat) an excellent and clear explanation both of the problems of scientific research and of the self-evident non-working status of Shape. We're eavesdropping on a coffee break by the swimming pool in the Indian elephant reserve.

Turin lowers the coffee cup and says he has a fundamental problem with the entire conference so far. Everyone has been talking about receptors, receptors, receptors. He says thoughtfully, "The Axel lab tends to distort reality between what they want or suspect to be true and what they know- know because they've done the experiment- to be true. I do the same thing. When you hear it from Axel, he has all the caveats firmly implanted in his mind, 'If this neuron acts like we think it does, then X.' but when you get it passed down the chain by breathless New York Times pieces or in conference talks by his students, you just get 'X,' full stop, and wild hypotheses tend to become gospel truths within a few repetitions. For example, this idea that a single neuron responds to a single odor that they've been repeating like a mantra." He makes a very French face. "That is simply factually wrong, and everyone doing physiology on the smell receptors knows it. The truth is that any receptor will respond to a wide variety of odorants. The most important property of a receptor is simply that *it *should *respond. The fact, which Susan in her talk made a big deal of, that the receptor is responding! well, that doesn't, that doesn't-" He searches for words to convey how utterly meaningless this is, then changes course and says "Put it this way: She's got these damn receptors sitting up and performing all sorts of tricks, she's putting odorants on them and they're responding and sending signals and rolling over and playing dead and doing everything except the one fundamental thing: She doesn't know whether or not they *smell. *Or *how *they *smell. These receptors look like they have all the necessary properties. They're in the right place and so on. But…"

He looks around for more coffee, but the coffeewalla is mobbed, so he drums his fingers on the half-filled cup and frowns at the wiring obsession. Perhaps it comes from what Turin calls dramatically "The Tortured History of the Fucking Smell Receptors." They are perversely mysterious, utterly recalcitrant, uncooperative. They taunted everyone, they still taunt everyone, no one can really figure them out. (We still don't even know where the smell molecule actually binds to the receptors.) But Turin is not interested, because he has, possibly, figured them out, and understandably he wants to talk about that.

"But. What you've witnessed today is typical of the field of olfaction, which is that since the discovery of these receptors by Buck and Axel the field has drifted toward gene expression and gene regulation and neuroanatomy- in a single word: Wiring. How does this little wire connect to that one? A bunch of electricians trying to figure out how the house is wired and completely ignoring the signals, the actual data, the crucial substance of information, The Meaning, that is flowing through them because they assume they know the answer (Shape...). And there's no control here because everything they find about the house's wiring you could apply equally to Shape or to Vibration, to any receptors for digestive enzymes or for drug molecules or what have you.

"Ah! but notice (and here is the point, points always being best illustrated with money): If you were one of the multi-billion dollar drug makers, what would you ask Buck and Axel and these other Shapists? Merck and Rhone-Poulenc and Eli Lilly and Bayer and all these guys and their stockholders who make billions making drugs, would listen to Susan's talk on receptor wiring and say well! this is all so very, very interesting and it's just lovely you've figured out that these are in fact the wires that are carrying the signals, but can we get to the billion dollar drug question? And the billion dollar question is: How does a drug connect to the receptor? How does it tell the system what to do? Why is Prozac doing what it's doing and how is it getting its message to the brain? And how do I design a drug to send exactly the message I want? That is the question everyone in medicine wants to know. That's the question that makes billions of dollars for Merck and Pfizer and Bayer. And that's not wiring. That's 'Is it Shape or is it Vibration.' If you were working on drugs, you wouldn't give a damn about any of this." He waves a hand at the conference room across the pool.

"And frankly the stockholders of the corporate smell analogs of Merck, Pfizer, Rhone-Poulenc, Bayer, and Eli Lilly- Givaudan, Quest, IFF, Ferminich, and Takasago- their stockholders should care about this if anything even more because they have even less information. At least the drug companies have something. Offhand example: Look at twenty adrenergic agonists that mimic noradrenaline, they have a bit of structural similarity. So Merck has at least something to build on. Givaudan's got squat. And if they asked Susan the billion dollar question, 'Where's the information? Where's The Message in the Molecule?' Susan would have to say: 'We don't know.' And so we sit here listening to the gene jockeys and neuroanatomy sleuths who are really just glorified electricians while the only real question, which they ignore, is How do you read the signal?"

Turin stops talking, puts down his coffee cup, the black pirosine-impregnated liquid cold in the bottom, grimly squares his shoulders, and troops back into the conference room.

Dr. Emily Troemel, an American, speaks next. She talks about the receptors, whether these are receptors in the worm C. elegans and whether they send signals through wiring to the brain. Troemel repeats Maas's statement, which repeated Shah's statement, that in humans it's one receptor/ one smell. She too presents it as fact, or more precisely she makes a de jure annotation that it is an assumption, but- de facto- the thrust of her work and the relevance of her results are all directly predicated on it. Her bottom line is that C. elegans has about 500 smell receptors, but no one how the receptors read the smells. No one know how to read The Message in the Molecule.