What's That Awful Smell?!!!

"Pretty much all the compounds you could draw out of thioacetone are going to reek."
"Not a lot of us have smelled a gem-dimercaptan. It could well be intense."
"It [combining dimethyl sulfide with silicon] smelled like what you'd imagine the exhaust of a U.F.O. to smell like."
"It was spectacularly weird and horrible."
Derek Lowe, medicinal chemist, director in Chemical Biology Therapeutics, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research

According to a expert chemist Derek Lowe, it can be difficult to know what chemicals produced the odour in an incident dating to 1889 that related to a substance called thioacetone, the subject of experiments in a German laboratory. One reaction from the use of the chemical produced an awful odour, so potent it was escaped the laboratory and contaminated the entire city where the laboratory was located. The reaction it caused among the residents was so impressive the resulting panic ended in mass evacuation.

Mr. Lowe theorizes that the thioacetone would have been converted into another chemical, one he suspects was gem-dimercaptan, which itself would have been subject to further reactions in a chain that resulted in a truly revolting smell. Despite the speculation over the incident, much discussed by chemists, there are none among them willing to figure out which molecules would have been produced by the reactions, by repeating the experiments.

Aroma strength is measured by the "odor detection threshold" associated with particular substances, determining the amount required to add to air before ordinary people are able to smell it. Gasoline, as an example, has an odour detection threshold of about 100 micrograms per cubic meter, so if three litres of it evaporated into the air from on high, it would produce vapour sufficient to give the air an odour like gasoline for 180 meters in all directions.

Ethyl mercaptan, added to natural gas so that leaks become detectable, has an odour detection threshold of just 1 or 2 micrograms per cubic meter, while a few pools of ethyl mercaptan the size of the reservoir in the middle of New York's Central Park, could, spread evenly throughout the atmosphere give the entire planet the smell of a gas leak. Methyl mercaptan, even smellier, might take merely one reservoir to make the globe reek.

On a more acceptable level, one of the substances with the lowest odour detection threshhold is vanillin, the major component of vanilla extract and while estimates vary, its odour detection threshold is likely around 0.1 or 0.2 micrograms per cubic meter, quite a bit lower than ethyl or methyl mercaptan. One or two oil tankers full of vanillin might be used conceivably to render the entire Earth smelling enticingly with the fragrance of vanilla.

In 1998 Pamela Dalton, a cognitive psychologist at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia was tasked with developing a stink bomb by the U.S. Department of Defense. She discovered in her studies, that people of different backgrounds from various parts of the world whose culture surrounded them with odours and foods specific to time and place frequently disagreed in descriptions of good or bad smells.

Dr. Dalton eventually discovered a candidate for a universally distasteful smell to be something named "U.S.Government Standard Bathroom Malodor", a substance designed to mimic the 'scent' of field latrines linked to the military for the purpose of testing cleaning products. That aromatic liquid was what she chose as the base of her recipe for a stink-bomb, and the resulting formula, Stench Soup, may represent the most rancid smell ever created.

The odour was described as "Satan on a throne of rotting onions", by science writer Mary Roach, one of the few people curious enough to make an effort at inhaling Stench Soup. Dr.Lowe recalls the worst thing he ever smelled came about when he combined dimethyl sulfide with some silicon he was experimenting with; the two odours combined, each of which is known to stink, produced a final odour beyond foul.

The second that ammonium sulphide breaks down to hydrogen sulphide and ammonia you've got yourself a stinky problem. Joe Schwarz, McGill, Office for Science and Society

How (Damningly) Sweet It Is

"The study in question ended for three reasons, none of which involved potential research findings." "The delay overlapped with an organizational restructuring with the Sugar Research Foundation becoming a new entity, the International Sugar Research Foundation."
"[The new paper represents] a collection of speculations and assumptions about events that happened nearly five decades ago [written and funded by] known critics of the sugar industry."
"[The study was halted not as a result of] potential research findings [but rather because it was behind schedule and over budget]."
The Sugar Association, trade group, Washington, D.C.

"Let's say this study had been going the other way and you could have fed these animals massive amounts of sugar and it didn't do anything. I'm sure [the sugar industry] would not have cut off the funding. They would be out there thumping the tub -- 'Look, we fed these rats, like, five gazillion pounds of sugar and it didn't matter'."
"What the sugar industry successively did, is they shifted all of the blame onto fats."
Stanton Glantz, professor, division of cardiology, University of California, San Francisco

A new report reveals how the industry influenced research in the 1960s to deflect concerns about the impact of sugar on health — including pulling the plug on a study it funded.  Karen M. Romanko/Getty Images

A new controversy has erupted over the role of sugar consumption in human health and disease outcomes related to over-consumption. The original study in question, dating back to 1968 and carried into 1970 was known as "Project 259". It appeared to discover that rodents fed a high-sucrose diet contained higher levels of an enzyme in their urine previously associated with bladder cancer in rats, according to the latest analysis of "the sugar papers" whose contents from a cache of internal memos, letters and company reports were discovered by University of California at San Francisco researchers.

The predecessor to the current International Sugar Research Foundation, the Sugar Research Foundation, had enlisted the scholarly service of a researcher to lead a study with laboratory animals and it is this study, initiated in 1968 that appeared to show a link between high sugar consumption and an increase in the test animals' triglyceride levels. Triglycerides are a type of fat circulating in the blood which affect gut bacteria. High triglycerides in humans may increase risk of heart attack and stroke. An enzyme associated with blood cancer was also discovered in the urine of rats fed sugar.

The researchers felt that their study hinted at a mechanism explaining how gut bacteria metabolize sugar, driving up triglycerides. Walter Pover, a biochemist at the University of Birmingham was hired and paid to lead the study and he set out to test the effects of different carbohydrates on triglycerides in two groups of rats; a germ-free group and rats with normal gut bacteria. In August of 1970 he presented a progress update reporting that the results "seem very interesting indeed".

The results that were of such immense interest to the researchers appeared -- according to the current researchers led by paper co-author Stanton Glantz -- considerably less "interesting" to the sugar industry. The germ-free rats fed sugar experienced no rise in triglyceride levels, whereas it appeared that triglycerides form when microbes in our gut ferment sucrose. The group of rats with gut microbia fed sucrose also showed higher levels of beta-glucuronidase, an enzyme associated with bladder cancer in humans.

 Dr. Pover asked for an additional twelve weeks to enable him to complete the experiments. In response the Sugar Association stated that the study had been extended a year as it was, and declined to further fund it, effectively putting an end to the study, with its initial findings left in limbo. According to the recent study's first author Cristin Kearns, had those findings been confirmed with the completion of the experiment, it would have given support to the argument taking place at the time that sucrose consumption increased heart disease risk.

The authors of the recent study out of University of California accusing the sugar industry of stepping on a conclusion that would have effectively brought into question the health safety of sugar consumption, was that the sugar industry "has consistently denied that sucrose has any metabolic effects related to chronic disease beyond its caloric effects", as the paper authors wrote in PLOS Biology.

Leaving the question of how health-destructive is sugar in the final analysis unanswered. Author Gary Taubes who had helped fund Dr. Kearns' study, in his book The Case Against Sugar, promotes a focus on sugar as the root cause of medical conditions most likely statistically to kill us "or at least accelerate our demise, in the 21st century". Yet even he acknowledges that the science for the present has not succeeded in unequivocally proving sugar to be "uniquely harmful -- a toxin that does its damage over the decades. The evidence is not as clear with sugar as it is with tobacco".

Which brings to mind the fat and saturated fat controversies with fat being blamed for decades for the onset of serious medical complications in people, particularly atherosclerosis and heart disease, claims that more recent research findings have seen the health community backtrack on. So if we were convinced through seemingly conclusive research with respect to the harms done us medically by fat, what are the chances the same will occur with condemning sugar as a catalyst for disease onset?