Many of us have used color wheels to get a visual sense of which colors are similar to each other and which are not. But there’s not really been a way to see which smells are similar to each other — until now. Rick Gerkin is part of a team that has put together something called a principal odor map, which aims to do for scents what the color wheel has done for color.
Gerkin is a professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. He’s also head of neuroscience at a startup firm called Osmo, which is dedicated to giving computers a sense of smell. Gerkin stopped by The Show to talk about his work — starting with what the principal odor map actually is.
Full conversation
RICK GERKIN: Yeah, the principal odor map you can think of it as a color wheel for smell. So when you're very young, you learn the relationships between the colors, you and you see this color wheel where on this wheel are colors that are seem like they look very similar to each other are located in nearby locations on the color wheel. And colors that are very different from each other are located in sort of opposite ends of the color wheel.
And so the principal odor map is essentially that for smell. So we can take any molecule and all smells are just caused by molecules going into the air and then going into your nose and being detected by your nervous system. And it takes any molecule and it projects it into this map. It puts it, it finds a location for it on the map that makes sense. So that molecules that smell similar to each other are in similar places on the map. And molecules that smell very different from each other are in different places. And then you can look at the map and you can say, oh, that's where all the peach smells lie and oh that's where all the jasmine smells are and so on.
MARK BRODIE: Is there universal agreement about which smells are actually those of peach or jasmine or rose or grass or particular foods?
GERKIN: There can be differences between people and between different cultures, but generally speaking, people who are, who are skilled in the art of of smell of master perfumers, for example, will tend to largely agree on the no, this is a grassy molecule, this is a peach molecule and so on.
BRODIE: What is the importance of being able to sort of visually see these molecules and sort of what smells like other things.
GERKIN: The visual part of it is sort of just eye candy in a sense. What really gives it power is that it's a, it's a digital representation of what a smell is. And because of the digital representation, computers can use it, right? So you can use that in a number of ways you can use that to predict for example, what a new molecule will smell like that you might want to create or what a mixture of such molecules might smell like if we were trying to formulate a new, a new fragrance, for example.
And then you can use that in you know, artificial intelligence applications to look a little bit further and see what else you can do with that technology. Like for example, scent teleportation.
BRODIE: All right. So let's talk about scent teleportation, which I know is something that you're, you're looking to work on next. What exactly does that refer to scent teleportation?
GERKIN: It is the, you know, olfactory or smell analogy to taking a picture and sending it to your friend. So we take for granted that now, you know, no matter what I'm looking at, I can just take a little photo of it and I can send it to you and, and, and you can see what I see and, and that's not something that we can do for smell and it wasn't always something that we could do for, for vision either in the 1800s after camera technology or photographic technology was first developed.
If you wanted a photograph, someone had to come to your property and they would bring two wagons and, and the wagons are basically mobile chemistry labs. One to take the picture and one to develop the picture and they required a lot of expertise. So it's very slow. And if you've seen, you know, old old timey photographs, they weren't that good over time, that technology became democratized by companies like Kodak that were able to, to take the same basic kind of technology and make it more portable, more accessible to more people, something that kind of worked almost every time. And then people could share pictures with each other. And it was this amazing thing that brought the visual world to everyone and we want to do the same thing for smell.
BRODIE: So does that mean that I could be standing in a park somewhere and smell a particular flower? And somehow I could have somebody who is not with me, smell that exact same flower.
GERKIN: That is the goal.
BRODIE: How do you do that?
GERKIN: So there are various kinds of, of sensor technologies in the same way that in a camera, you have ways of capturing photons of light that are hitting the camera and then that gets stored as a digital representation in either in the memory of the camera or in an older version of this, we had film, it would be it would impinge upon the film and it would make some sort of an imprint that you could then go use later to develop the film.
So similarly, there are technologies to say these are the molecules that are in the air. Some of the molecules are important for the smell and some are not. So the most important thing is you'd be able to detect the ones that are important and then use that to make a digital representation of what the smell was at that time and place that you were smelling. And then when you have that representation, you want to recreate that on the other end.
So once this information can be sent as bits you know over the internet like anything else. And then on the other end, you have some sort of device that takes that representation and turns it back into some molecules, maybe not the same molecules, maybe very different molecules, but that have the same odor profile that smells the same as this flower you smell in the park.
BRODIE: So what are the applications of this? Because I would imagine it would be really nice like I love the smell of my mom's apple pie. For example, she could send that to me if I'm not at her house. But I would imagine there also have to be more applications for it than just, you know, feeling good about family or like, you know, if, if you're somebody who really loves the smell of fresh cut grass or something, like, are there more maybe societal applications for this?
GERKIN: Well, I wouldn't underrate just feeling good about things. That's mostly why I take photographs too. But you can document what, what, what is happening in place, not just visually or, or in terms of sound, but in terms of the smell, in terms of the chemical environment that's there. So it could be something where you need to identify. OK. This I'm in this environment and what this smell is signaling, something signaling, something about the state of, of food or, or some sort of scenario that could be dangerous as some chemical hazard or, or the presence or absence of a certain kind of animal, for example, or a diagnostic, medical, diagnostic.
You know, many kinds of diseases create volatiles that are released by the human body, volatile molecules that are a signature of that disease. Animals can smell them. We know it's, they can do it if we could smell the same things with computers that were portable, we all hold in our pocket that we could do, you know early detection of a lot of very bad diseases.
BRODIE: So how long do you think it might take until sent teleportation becomes a reality?
GERKIN: And at the company Osmo that I work for, we have various milestones for sent teleportation. And we are hoping that within a year we'll have some real progress to show.
BRODIE: Really.
GERKIN: Now, this is still a research problem. But we want, we want to democratize smell, we want to put this in the hands of people. So releasing products, I mean, that's still a much longer timeline. It took, you know, Kodak, you know, decades and decades to go from essentially being able to do photography that's accessible to people versus, you know, mass market production, right? And we'd like to speed run that as much as possible, but it’s also going to take time.
BRODIE: So do you think that while you're working on that, does having sort of a map of, of the molecules that creates sense, does that help people maybe sort of start to think about what scents are and what they're actually made of and come up with, you know, some sort of language that they can use to describe them? You know, so that when this scent teleportation comes online at some point that maybe people are more ready to be able to use it and, and use it in the way that you're hoping they do.
GERKIN: Yeah, I think it can be very educational. So if you want to take a color wheel example, so you've priced in a color wheel where that has little wedges and the wedges are already given names, right, red, orange and yellow, and so on. It's a different kind of idea of a color wheel, which is called CIE color space, which is what it's used for color correction in production applications. There's no labels of colors on that map there, but you can nonetheless see all the colors and you can see how they relate to wavelengths of light and various combinations of wavelengths of light.
But in, in, in by analogy and with smells having developed this map and the map itself doesn't say what the locations on the map, how they're labeled, right? It's like a, it's like a big map of countries that just have the outlines but don't have the names you and I can go and smell one part of the map. A bunch of things that all smell very similar. We could say, OK, we're gonna call that muguet. Muguet is already a technical term that corresponds to Lily of the Valley. But if you use the map, you can actually like really like label things much more formally and I could share that map with you.
And you could say OK, when we're here, that means it's this word and we're at this other location. That's this other word, then we can learn how to communicate about order.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Due to an editing error, this story has been updated to correct the spelling of Rick Gerkin's name.
