To regress to Ozone as a decontaminating agent, only recently have we, as a species, lent the power of science to uncovering the ways and means of "odors." an American neuroscientist by the name of Axel, won the 2004 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his research on the sense of smell. Linda B. Buck shared the honors with Axel by researching the genetic control of the sense of smell.

Our “olfactory system” is the place that we and other animals gain smell.

People detect smells by breathing in air that carries odors. Odors come from molecules that have been released into the air from many different substances. These molecules stimulate olfactory receptor cells inside the nose. The receptor cells send the impulses created by the odor along the olfactory nerves. The nerve impulses travel to the brain, which processes the impulses into information about the odor.

In 1991, Axel and Buck together discovered the family of genes that control the production of odor receptors in human beings and other animals. Each human body cell contains 23 pairs of chromosomes and an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 genes. Axel, Buck, and others have identified about 350 active odor receptor genes in human beings. This number represents about 1 percent of all genes that make up a human being. Each one of these active genes produces a unique type of odor receptor. Scientists were surprised to learn that human beings have as many as 350 different types of odor receptors. In comparison, the human eye contains just four types of light receptors.

Through a series of laboratory experiments in the 1990’s, Axel and Buck, working independently, discovered that each olfactory receptor cell is sensitive to multiple types of odor molecules. Most odors are made up of many different molecules, which stimulate many individual receptors in the nose. The pattern of nerve impulses received from hundreds of different odor receptors is processed by the brain to create the sensation of different odors that people experience.

Imagine living without the sense of smell. Smell is one of the most important and basic senses in animals and human beings. Some animals use the sense of smell to recognize their home territory, animals of their own kind, and other kinds of animals. They also use smell to find food and mates. The scientific term for smell is olfaction, and the system by which we smell is known as the olfactory system.

The olfactory nerves then carry the impulses to a part of the brain called the olfactory bulb. In dogs and some other vertebrates, the olfactory bulb is large, but in people it is relatively small. The size of an animal's olfactory bulb may be an indication of how important the sense of smell is to that animal. The type of odor smelled determines where the nerve impulses arrive in the olfactory bulb. From the olfactory bulb, the nerve impulses travel toward the forebrain, at the front of the cerebrum of the brain. Parts of the forebrain process the impulses into information about the odor.

Taste and smell. Generally, we taste and smell food at about the same time. Thus, we have come to think of the two senses as being related. But they are, in fact, separate. Only at some point in the brain are the separate senses combined.

The smell-stimulus parts in food can be separated from the taste-stimulus parts. This separation can be achieved by blowing clean air into the nose while the food is put into the mouth, or by allowing food to contact the taste buds but not the air. When smell stimuli are separated from taste stimuli, people cannot identify some foods and beverages—for example, cherries, chocolate, and coffee—though they still taste them.

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