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I found this interesting only because so many of us have lost our sense of smell ... Meat scent could help scientists decode human sense of smell Copyright © 1998 Nando.net Copyright © 1998 Reuters Nando's special report: 1997 Year in Review WASHINGTON (January 8, 1998) - A protein that helps humans pick out the odor of meat may act as a "Rosetta stone" for decoding the human sense of smell, researchers say. Molecular biologists at New York's Columbia University said they had, for the first time, linked a particular smell to the protein in the nose that recognizes it. "I believe this experiment will prove to be a Rosetta stone for olfaction, in that we can now begin to match odorants to receptors and decode this elusive sense," Darcy Kelly, a biology professor at Columbia, said in a statement. The Rosetta stone, carrying a message in three languages, helped archeologists finally translate Egyptian hieroglyphics. Nerve cells in the nose are known to carry specific receptors for the molecules that carry scent, but no one has been able to match up individual receptors to smells. People are known to have more than 1,000 such receptors. "That's an enormous number devoted to a single sensory activity," biologist Stuart Firestein, who led the study, said. Firestein's team used rat nerve cells, and sprayed 74 different scents over them. The first one they could link to a receptor was for octanal, which carries the scent of meat to humans. Related molecules, which smell like grass or fruit, did not activate the cells. Judith Richards [log in to unmask]