Chandler Burr

Extreme-Pressure Diving, Spicy Food, and Smell Failure. An anecdote showing the randomness of clues and hints that go into Turin's brand of scientific research.

Purely by chance, a bizarre datum surfaced in Nice. Turin had gone down, seen some old friends. One of them was the girlfriend of a doctor with an unusual job, head doctor of the hyperbaric ("extreme pressure") medical team of a French commercial group called Comex, based, naturally, in Marseilles. So he met the guy.

Comex's business is to send deep-sea divers down to extraordinary depths of 800 feet or so to fix oil rigs It's an extremely dangerous affair (any number of accidents involving too-rapid decompression, the breathing of all sorts of, and sometimes too much, unusual gases, suffocation, drownings, etc.) and arduous in other ways (the divers live at extreme depths for weeks since it takes them a week simply to come back to the surface) and a very lucrative one for Comex.

It is also medically bizarre. The medical team had a rather sophisticated playground in which they tested men under hyperbaric conditions. The reason Turin had eagerly accepted the medic's offer of a tour of their set was what super high-pressure did to another of his intellectual fascinations, anaesthetics: At 12 meters, pure oxygen turns into an anaesthetic. Normal air with 70% nitrogen becomes anaesthetic at 40 meters. It wasn't just that the men went to sleep; it was that they died. Nitrogen narcosis, it's called. After 40 meters they were breathing almost pure hydrogen with a tiny bit of oxygen. ("You wouldn't," says Turin nonchalantly, "want to strike a match.") But as the doctor was talking about all this, he happened to mention, apropos of not really anything, shaking his head, "Oh, by the way, they've got this funny thing where they can't taste their food."

Huh? said Turin, and pricked up his ears.

Yeah, said the medic, the divers reported a virtually complete loss of smell. They complained that the food tasted like nothing at all. This, of course, is essentially smell dysfunction. The cooks on the surface sent them down the hottest curries, the spiciest things they could create. They tasted not a bit of it. Their sense of taste and smell had, said the doctor, disappeared.

Turin began cranking on it: Why the hell would smell not work at extreme depths? If you were smelling vibrating molecules, and if each vibration was subject to pressure (and they all are), this pressure on the vibrations would be like clamping your hand on a ringing bell. The vibration would be smothered. Pressure wouldn't, it seemed, affect Shape. Down in the pressure, breathing those strange gases, people feel pretty much normal in every way. Except that their smell, as Turin put it excitedly, is shot to shit. Seemed to be that these divers couldn't smell because the pressure simply damped down the vibrations of all smelly molecules.

"I'd like to volunteer next time those guys go down," said Turin, talking about it, "because the thing is the phenomenon should be proportional to wave numbers. At some depth, you should cross into a pressure where you can no longer smell odors with lower-energy wave numbers but still smell Sulfur, which vibrates high up with lots of energy."

He was excited. He'd thought up another experiment....