Pondering the potential of a pee-poll

My buddy Jack is a high school science teacher — the kind of teacher you wish you had when you were in school. That’s because he goes out of his way to make science real and interesting in an everyday way.

Take his asparagus study, for example.

Every year, he brings a bundle of fresh asparagus spears to class, and he gives one spear to each of his students. As they munch it down, he tells them, “The experiment has begun.”

He then explains that asparagus has a curious effect on anybody who eats it: It makes your urine smell “skunky.” But that’s only the start of the fun, because another curious effect is that only about half of us can actually smell it.

“And because it only takes about 15 minutes for the effect to kick in,” he tells them, “in the second half of the class period I’ll give everybody a pass to go one at a time to the restroom, where you can pee and find out which half of the population you belong to. When you come back, we’ll take a poll. You’ll mark on the blackboard whether you’re a ‘smeller’ or a ‘non-smeller.’”

See, science, rocks! At least it does in Jack’s classes.

Sure enough, at the end of the period about half of the students come back gagging at how bad the bathroom reeked, but the other half come back and say, “No, my pee didn’t smell any different.”

“Ah, but it did,” he tells them. “You just couldn’t smell it. That’s the experiment.”

Inevitably, an argument ensues. If half of a population claims to smell an odor to their urine, and the other half does not, how can you be certain which half is right? Maybe some pee smells and some doesn’t. After all, smell is merely a perception, right? And how can you say that your perception is clearer or more accurate than mine?

Because, Jack explains, facts are still facts. “Skunky asparagus-pee is a chemical fact in everybody, whether you yourself can smell it or not. And a fact is a fact, even if you’re immune to perceiving it.”

And now that they had separated the “smellers” from the “non-smellers,” they could conduct a second experiment to verify whether skunky asparagus pee is hit-or-miss, or whether it is a rock-solid universal fact that only some can perceive. In this experiment, Jack could send students one by one into a room with a bundle of asparagus in it. They could eat a spear (or not) and come back and tell which choice they made — or lie about it.

Then he could send them one by one to pee in mason jars. With the jars lined up in a row back in the classroom, those who identified themselves as “non-smellers” in the first experiment wouldn’t have a clue which jar was which, because to them, none of the jars would have an unusual odor. But every verified “smeller” from the first experiment would be able to point out each and every asparagus culprit and separate them from the non-asparagus suspects, without fail.

Because facts are facts, whether some of us can accurately perceive them or not. And that’s what science is all about—finding ways to verify facts, and not always trusting our perceptions of things.

To my knowledge, Jack’s experiments never went as far as mason jars because…well, come on. These are high school kids, and if you’ve ever spent any time with teenagers, you’d know that high on the list of things you don’t want them to do is: “Walk around with mason jars of urine.”

But Jack hasn’t had to go that far with his experiments, because the professional scientific community has backed up his findings in experiments of their own.

According to a 2016 study by Lorelei Mucci, associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, as many as 60 percent of 6,900 people could not smell asparagus-pee. They were immune to perceiving the stench, thanks to some unique combination of variants in their genes. Women were less likely than men to smell it, and strangely enough, Scandinavians and Irish were the least likely of all.

The study was limited, of course, because all participants were Americans of European descent. Would results differ among those of Asian or African descent? Only more study would tell.

But wait a minute. In the interest of science, there’s a bigger question here, isn’t there? I mean, why stop at asparagus?

After all, if some combination of genetic variants can render a large percentage of the population to be nose-blind to the rock-solid fact of skunky asparagus-pee, is it possible that some genetic stew also blinds our political perceptions?

Is that why so many can look at rock-solid facts and dismiss them as “fake news”? And when you wave a mason jar under their nose reeking with racism, bigotry, greed, corruption and lies, is that why they can say with such certainty: “Nothing to smell here”?

That sure would explain a lot, wouldn’t it?

Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.

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