(July 8, 2015) An
Arizona State University researcher is calling into question recent findings
that the human nose is capable of distinguishing at least 1 trillion odors.
Rick Gerkin, an assistant research professor with ASU School
of Life Sciences, said the data used in a study made public last year does not
support this claim.
According to Gerkin, this is important because findings from
the 2014 study published in the journal Science are already making their way
into neuroscience textbooks, misinforming up-and-coming investigators and
cutting off potentially productive lines of research that do not adhere to
those findings. Researchers from Rockefeller University and Howard Hughes
Medical Institute authored that paper.
The new paper challenging the findings appears today in the
journal eLife.
“We disagree with several aspects of the 2014 study,” said
Gerkin, who co-authored the paper with Jason Castro, a professor with Bates
College in Maine. “First, the assertion that humans can discriminate between at
least 1 trillion odors is based on a fragile mathematical framework — one
that’s capable of creating nearly any result with small variations in the data
or the experiment design. So the result in question could be tens of orders of
magnitude — a factor of one with dozens of zeros after it — larger or smaller
than first reported."