The dogs still make Andreas Mershin angry. “I mean, I love dogs,” says the Greek-Russian scientist, in his office at MIT. “But the dogs are slapping me in the face.”
He pulls up a video to show me what he means. In it, a black dog named Lucy approaches a series of six stations, each separated by a small barrier. At every one, a glass cup of human urine with a screened lid sits at the level of the animal’s nose. Lucy takes a brief sniff of each sample, sometimes digging her snout in to get a better whiff. She is performing a kind of diagnostic test: searching for the telltale scent of prostate cancer, which, it turns out, leaves a volatile, discernible signature in a man’s pee. Discernible if you’re a dog, anyway. When Lucy finds what she’s looking for, she sits down and receives a treat.
Among humans—whose toolmaking prowess has given the world self-driving suitcases and reusable rocket boosters—prostate cancer is notoriously difficult to detect. The prevailing method is to check a patient’s blood for elevated levels of a protein called prostate-specific antigen. But the test has a miserable track record. The scientist who first discovered PSA has described the test as “hardly more effective than a coin toss.” A false positive can lead to a prostate biopsy, a harrowing procedure that involves inserting a large, hollow needle through the wall of the rectum to retrieve a tissue sample from the prostate itself.
Properly trained dogs, on the other hand, can detect prostate cancer with better than 90 percent accuracy, and with sleek, tail-wagging efficiency. In the video, Lucy works her way through six samples in just a couple of minutes. This drives Mershin up the wall. “We have $100 million worth of equipment downstairs. And the dog can beat me?” he says. “That is pissing me off.” (...)
Mershin’s lab, where he keeps that $100 million worth of equipment, sits a few floors down from his office at MIT. In one room, researchers are trying to invent new colors; in another, to create the lightest, strongest materials on earth. But I’m here because this facility is doing some of the most important research in the world toward developing AO—artificial olfaction.
Plenty of robots these days can see, hear, speak, and (crudely) think. But good luck finding one that can smell. In part, that’s simply because olfaction has always been deeply underrated by humans—a species of cerebral, hypervisual snobs. Kant dismissed smell as the “most dispensable” of our five senses. One 2011 poll found that 53 percent of people ages 16 to 22 would rather give up their sense of smell than give up their smartphones and computers.
But in the past several years, it has become increasingly clear that smell, in the right snout, can be a kind of superpower. For millennia, humans have prized dogs for their tracking abilities; police and armed forces have long used them to sniff out bombs, drugs, and bodies. But since about the early 2000s, an avalanche of findings has dramatically expanded our sense of what dogs can do with their noses. It started when researchers realized that canines can smell the early onset of melanoma. Then it turned out they can do the same for breast cancer, lung cancer, colorectal cancer, and ovarian cancer. They can smell the time of day in the movement of air around a room; sense diabetic episodes hours in advance; and detect human emotional states in the absence of visual cues. And it’s not just dogs. Tipped off by a Scottish nurse with a highly attuned nose, scientists have recently learned that people with Parkinson’s disease begin emitting a distinct “woody, musky odor” years before they show symptoms.
All this adds up to a revelation not just about dogs but about the physical world itself. Events and diseases and mental states leave reports in the air—ones that are intelligible to highly attuned olfactory systems but otherwise illegible to science. Smell, it appears, is sometimes the best way of detecting and discriminating between otherwise hidden things out in the world. And often, the next-best method of detecting that same thing is expensive (gas chromatography/mass spectrometry) or excruciating (tissue biopsies) or impossible (mind reading).
Unfortunately, the other reason we don’t have robots that can smell is that olfaction remains a stubborn biological enigma. Scientists are still piecing together the basics of how we sense all those volatile compounds and how our brains classify that information. “There are more unknowns than knowns,” says Hiroaki Matsunami, a researcher at Duke University.
Mershin, however, believes that we don’t really have to understand how mammals smell to build an artificial nose. He’s betting that things will work the other way around: To understand the nose, we have to build one first. In his efforts with a brilliant mentor named Shuguang Zhang, Mershin has built a device that can just begin to give dogs—his panting adversaries—a run for their money.
by Sara Harrison, Wired | Read more:
Image: Bobby Doherty
He pulls up a video to show me what he means. In it, a black dog named Lucy approaches a series of six stations, each separated by a small barrier. At every one, a glass cup of human urine with a screened lid sits at the level of the animal’s nose. Lucy takes a brief sniff of each sample, sometimes digging her snout in to get a better whiff. She is performing a kind of diagnostic test: searching for the telltale scent of prostate cancer, which, it turns out, leaves a volatile, discernible signature in a man’s pee. Discernible if you’re a dog, anyway. When Lucy finds what she’s looking for, she sits down and receives a treat.
Among humans—whose toolmaking prowess has given the world self-driving suitcases and reusable rocket boosters—prostate cancer is notoriously difficult to detect. The prevailing method is to check a patient’s blood for elevated levels of a protein called prostate-specific antigen. But the test has a miserable track record. The scientist who first discovered PSA has described the test as “hardly more effective than a coin toss.” A false positive can lead to a prostate biopsy, a harrowing procedure that involves inserting a large, hollow needle through the wall of the rectum to retrieve a tissue sample from the prostate itself.Properly trained dogs, on the other hand, can detect prostate cancer with better than 90 percent accuracy, and with sleek, tail-wagging efficiency. In the video, Lucy works her way through six samples in just a couple of minutes. This drives Mershin up the wall. “We have $100 million worth of equipment downstairs. And the dog can beat me?” he says. “That is pissing me off.” (...)
Mershin’s lab, where he keeps that $100 million worth of equipment, sits a few floors down from his office at MIT. In one room, researchers are trying to invent new colors; in another, to create the lightest, strongest materials on earth. But I’m here because this facility is doing some of the most important research in the world toward developing AO—artificial olfaction.
Plenty of robots these days can see, hear, speak, and (crudely) think. But good luck finding one that can smell. In part, that’s simply because olfaction has always been deeply underrated by humans—a species of cerebral, hypervisual snobs. Kant dismissed smell as the “most dispensable” of our five senses. One 2011 poll found that 53 percent of people ages 16 to 22 would rather give up their sense of smell than give up their smartphones and computers.
But in the past several years, it has become increasingly clear that smell, in the right snout, can be a kind of superpower. For millennia, humans have prized dogs for their tracking abilities; police and armed forces have long used them to sniff out bombs, drugs, and bodies. But since about the early 2000s, an avalanche of findings has dramatically expanded our sense of what dogs can do with their noses. It started when researchers realized that canines can smell the early onset of melanoma. Then it turned out they can do the same for breast cancer, lung cancer, colorectal cancer, and ovarian cancer. They can smell the time of day in the movement of air around a room; sense diabetic episodes hours in advance; and detect human emotional states in the absence of visual cues. And it’s not just dogs. Tipped off by a Scottish nurse with a highly attuned nose, scientists have recently learned that people with Parkinson’s disease begin emitting a distinct “woody, musky odor” years before they show symptoms.
All this adds up to a revelation not just about dogs but about the physical world itself. Events and diseases and mental states leave reports in the air—ones that are intelligible to highly attuned olfactory systems but otherwise illegible to science. Smell, it appears, is sometimes the best way of detecting and discriminating between otherwise hidden things out in the world. And often, the next-best method of detecting that same thing is expensive (gas chromatography/mass spectrometry) or excruciating (tissue biopsies) or impossible (mind reading).
Unfortunately, the other reason we don’t have robots that can smell is that olfaction remains a stubborn biological enigma. Scientists are still piecing together the basics of how we sense all those volatile compounds and how our brains classify that information. “There are more unknowns than knowns,” says Hiroaki Matsunami, a researcher at Duke University.
Mershin, however, believes that we don’t really have to understand how mammals smell to build an artificial nose. He’s betting that things will work the other way around: To understand the nose, we have to build one first. In his efforts with a brilliant mentor named Shuguang Zhang, Mershin has built a device that can just begin to give dogs—his panting adversaries—a run for their money.
by Sara Harrison, Wired | Read more:
Image: Bobby Doherty
