The Terrors of Creating a New Theory. Although the terror over "does it smell of benzene or truffles?" nicely illustrates the agonies Turin went through at almost every step, we cut this paragraph simply for length. It came out of the chapter "Creation."

The thing about bringing a new theory to life is that you are constantly going through near-death experiences. Someone claims to find something that contradicts you, and you think "God, my theory is DOA!" (and then it turns out to be- oops, never mind- a false alarm), or they *do find something, real, and you have to perform emergency surgery on your theory to keep it alive, juggling it till it explains this new information. So you live another day. It's exhausting and it makes you incredibly jumpy. Having the "why don't these smell receptors react?" mystery hanging over him was bad enough. It stoked Turin's natural impatience and made him gun-shy. But he had other scares, mostly various false alarms arising from the simple adjectives, just adjectives, that people in the field used to describe smells, since the precise, exact smells of various molecules- "Well, was it a lemon smell or was it actually lime with lemony mint?"- was make-or-break. And it seemed like no one in smell actually smelled anything! Nor had any way to put smells in words. "Got some thiophen (really pure stuff from Aldrich) this morning," he recounted, his heartbeat still ragged, to Stewart in an email one day. He had looked up the smell description in the Merck index and- heart attack. "I was *really *worried: It said thiophen had a 'Faint, benzene-like odour, etc.'" (This was not the smell his theory predicted; thiophen should smell like *truffles, not benzene!) "'What about those C-S bonds????'" he wailed in the email, and then: "I open the bottle: *strong* truffle-like smell." His relief was as palpable as his disgust (some Merck chemist incapable of telling a smell from his elbow had given him a minor coronary). This sort of thing led to volumes of acid commentary by Turin on the astounding, idiotic inability of people to smell things accurately. He growled to Stewart: "Beware anosmic writers..."