What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [112]
Next, imagine a new kind of diet product—one with an immediate and profound effect on appetite: food would lose its appeal and odor-induced cravings would disappear. In biological terms this would be a wide-range odor blocker that interferes with many types of receptors. By reducing odor perception across the board, including food aroma, the blocker would help dieters stay on their program. A recent patent application makes such a claim for a calcium channel blocker—a type of drug usually used to control high blood pressure. Applied directly into the nose, it would temporarily stop the sensory cells from functioning, and reduce or abolish the user’s ability to smell.
By changing receptor function in other ways, we may be able to enhance odor perception. Imagine a product that selectively boosts the perception of certain body odors, like your husband’s pheromones. It might heighten sexual interest or arousal and be a useful treatment for sexual dysfunction. (It would probably become popular with ravers, clubbers, and swingers too—a nasal Ecstasy.) Another possibility is a broad-range odor booster. The results could be mind-blowing. The neurologist and essayist Oliver Sacks once described a patient who experienced heightened smell awareness while pumped up on amphetamines, cocaine, and PCP. The immediacy and clarity of smells was so great that he could find his way around New York by nose alone. Not everybody would want to have such a peak experience, although it’s a product that Emily Dickinson would have paid top dollar for. At a lower dose, a broad-range odor booster might relieve smell impairment in the elderly. Their food will taste better, they will eat more, and their nutrition will improve. Who knows, it might even alleviate the psychological depression that creeps along in tandem with the sensory deprivation of old age.
The temporary tweaking of existing odor receptors is, from a biotechnologist’s point of view, pretty straightforward. The sensory cells of the nose are in direct contact with the outside world, separated by only a thin layer of mucus. They can be reached easily with a topical nasal spray, which means a minimal amount of active ingredient and less chance of side effects. The really weird possibilities go deeper: imagine acquiring a new odor receptor gene. All you would have to do is take a big snort from spray bottle of genetically modified adenovirus, and within days you’d be having a new smell experience. Perhaps your specific anosmia to androstenone will be cured, enabling you for the first time to enjoy the expensive pleasure of truffles. Perhaps you will have a new, deeper appreciation of musky perfumes. Suppose the inhaled virus particles contained all the odor receptors a dog has and you haven’t. By the weekend you’d be smelling things our species hasn’t picked up in millions of years. The experience might be disconcerting at first, like getting powerful new contact lenses. Your brain would need time to adjust to the new odor input and bring it into focus.
This is a fantasy, but not a completely implausible one. Gene-transfer technology is routinely used in research labs. DNA is carried from one organism to another in a modified adenovirus—the virus that causes the common cold. The virus is unable to replicate on its own, but it can worm its way into the DNA of the host cells and trick them into reproducing the transferred gene.
Gene-transfer technology for humans is usually thought of in terms of treatment for life-threatening illness. But in the spirit of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, where characters favor trans-species body modification, I predict it will be used first for nonmedical and entirely unnecessary aesthetic enhancements to the human body. In similar fashion, the first animal-to-human odor receptor implant will take place for kicks, not for cure.
Transspecies genetic engineering of sensory systems is already happening