Molly Birnbaum - When all you can smell is your brain

In the summer of 2005 Molly Birnbaum was out jogging near her home in Brookline Massachusetts when she was hit by a car.

The impact fractured her skull and severed her olfactory nerves, leaving her without a sense of smell.

The prognosis was bad - Birnbaum was told she would never smell again. Depressed and deprived of her sense of smell, and therefore taste, she was forced to give up her place at culinary college and with it, her ambitions of becoming a chef.

Instead of resigning herself to living without scent, Birnbaum ended up on a quest to find out more about this mysterious sense, and eventually got her sense of smell back.

She tells this story in her book Season to Taste.

I started to get a few scents back one at a time, slowly but very attached to memory and emotion. As that went on I began to be very curious as to what was going on in my nose, in my brain, how come I didn't know anything about the sense of smell even though it so affected my life.

So I began to talk to scientists and doctors about the science of smell. I spoke with chefs and perfumers and I spent time in a flavour lab in New Jersey, I went to a perfume school in France, and spent time with neurologist Oliver Sacks and really tried to explore what it means to smell.

A little while after the accident I was helping my mother to cook dinner. I was chopping a bunch of fresh rosemary, and all of a sudden this smell hit me out of nowhere. It had been so long since I had smelt anything I was shocked. It was just this glorious scent of herbs and earthy rosemary and it reminded me of my childhood. It gave me a lot of hope.

At one point i became convinced i could smell my own brain. This was very disturbing. One common thing when people lose their sense of smell is to experience phantom smells - smells that don't actually exist from a concrete source in reality. I have met people who have had horrible ones - rotting smells, or garlic smells when they are trying to eat a fresh peach - but for me it was much more subtle.

Towards the beginning of my experience I could smell this one smell all the time. The only way I could make sense of it was that this smell was coming from within me, that it was probably my brain. It was one of the stories I told myself to make sense of this experience.

I think what I really lost was the emotional component to certain memories, the memories we have when we smell something familiar and are immediately transported back to a moment in our past - kind of like a punch in the gut emotion. When I couldn't smell I could still remember these events, I just didn't have that punch in the gut. And I worried about how, if I could never smell again, that would affect the memories that I should be making in the future.

Fighting Malaria: Venderbilt and Yale Scientists Transplant the Nose of Mosquito

Scientists at Vanderbilt and Yale universities have successfully transplanted most of the "nose" of the mosquito that spreads malaria into frog eggs and fruit flies and are employing these surrogates to combat the spread of the deadly and debilitating disease that afflicts 500 million people.

The research is described in two complimentary papers, one published this week in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the other which appeared online Feb. 3 in the journal Nature.

The mosquito's "nose" is centered in its antennae, which are filled with nerve cells covered with special "odorant receptors" that react to different chemical compounds. The insect ORs are comparable to analogous receptors in the human nose and taste buds on the tongue.

"We've successfully expressed about 80 percent of the Anopheles mosquito's odorant receptors in frog's eggs and in the fruit fly antennae," says Laurence Zwiebel, professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt, whose lab performed the frog egg transplantation. The fruit-fly (Drosophila melanogaster) work was done in the laboratory of John Carlson, Eugene Higgins Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale.

Both accomplishments are part of a five-year project supported by the Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative funded by the Foundation for NIH through a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with the goal of producing novel ways to inhibit the spread of malaria. Scientists from the Wageningen University in the Netherlands, the African Insect Science for Food and Health Institute in Kenya, Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania and the Medical Research Council Laboratories in the Gambia are also participating in the project.