n. A genetically determined smell that is unique to each individual.
2003
Hot on the scent of a suspected terrorist? Darpa — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — hopes to give literal meaning to the phrase. It wants someone to develop a sniffing machine that can detect individuals by their body odor.
The idea is not as rank as it may seem. Dogs are said, at least by dog handlers, to recognize the scents of individual people. Researchers have found that mice can detect from body odor and urine how closely they are related to one another, a useful way to avoid inbreeding. So Darpa, the grand patron of exotic military arts (not everything it does works, but it did have a hand in creating the precursor of the Internet), is soliciting "innovative proposals to (1) determine whether genetically-determined odortypes can be used to identify specific individuals, and if so (2) to develop the science and enabling technology for detecting and identifying specific individuals by such odortypes."
With the high-tech identification industry going into full gear with machines that recognize fingerprints and scan the iris, why is Darpa messing with something as old-fashioned as B.O.? Dr. Gary Beauchamp, director of the Monell Chemical Sense Center in Philadelphia, notes that odors can be detected through just a handful of molecules. Also, unlike sight and sound, the smells from a fugitive can linger for hours or days.
The idea is not as rank as it may seem. Dogs are said, at least by dog handlers, to recognize the scents of individual people. Researchers have found that mice can detect from body odor and urine how closely they are related to one another, a useful way to avoid inbreeding. So Darpa, the grand patron of exotic military arts (not everything it does works, but it did have a hand in creating the precursor of the Internet), is soliciting "innovative proposals to (1) determine whether genetically-determined odortypes can be used to identify specific individuals, and if so (2) to develop the science and enabling technology for detecting and identifying specific individuals by such odortypes."
With the high-tech identification industry going into full gear with machines that recognize fingerprints and scan the iris, why is Darpa messing with something as old-fashioned as B.O.? Dr. Gary Beauchamp, director of the Monell Chemical Sense Center in Philadelphia, notes that odors can be detected through just a handful of molecules. Also, unlike sight and sound, the smells from a fugitive can linger for hours or days.
1994 (earliest)
Genetically determined body odors that distinguish one mouse from another are termed odortypes.
Olfactory researchers have come up with some interesting findings related to human smells. For example, it has been known for a while that newborn babies can identify their mothers on the basis of smell alone. Not to be outdone, new mothers can identify their infants by smell within 24 hours of giving birth. Siblings, too, can recognize each other by smell. Dogs, with their ultra-sensitive noses, can distinguish between fraternal twins based on smell, but they can't distinguish between identical twins. All this suggests that, with the exception of identical twins, each person has a distinctive smell and this smell is gene-based. (See the first example citation for more details on this.) Since the visible expression of an organism's genes is called its phenotype, researchers have labeled this gene-based smell the odortype.