My son’s Brittany spaniel is an olfactory wonder.
Whenever I go to visit, he dashes circles around my legs, praying to play fetch. (The dog, not my son. That would be creepy.)
The yard is filled with fetchable things — chewed up tennis balls, bones, sticks, rubber toys — and all I have to do is choose one of them and give it a toss. Cinder the spaniel dashes off and brings it back.
After one or two tosses, I tell Cinder to sit and stay, and I walk off out of sight to hide the fetchable thing somewhere he can’t see it. Under the rhubarb plants, maybe, or tucked into the wood pile behind the garage.
And when I return to Cinder and give him the go-ahead, he dashes around the yard until he catches scent of our fetchable thing of the day. He’ll dash past yesterday’s fetchable thing, or last week’s, knowing exactly which fetchable thing is on today’s docket.
And then he zeros in on it, snuffles it out, and prances back to me with it in his mouth, ignoring all those other fetchable things that were so much fun in previous visits.
Amazing.
So you don’t have to convince me how keen a dog’s sense of smell is. I’ve witnessed it so many times in my life.
Take Odie, the dog that lived with my friend Gary, who worked for Orkin Pest Control. Odie wasn’t Gary’s pet, he was a work colleague, because Odie had been trained to sniff out bedbugs.
Gary’s job at Orkin was to take Odie to fancy hotels like the Hilton every now and then, and let him wander around in the rooms for a while. If there was even one single bedbug in that room, even a dead one, Odie would snuffle him out and make some sort of prearranged “sign.”
That would alert the hotel that it had to shut down the room, dispose of almost everything in it, clean it beyond cleanliness, and invite Odie back for another round of unsigned snuffling before the room could be used again for human guests.
Or take that beagle that stopped my buddy Bill and me at O’Hare Field when we returned from Ireland a few years ago. She sat and plopped her paw on Bill’s carry-on bag, then looked up with those adorable puppy-dog eyes.
Her handler asked Bill, “Are you bringing any citrus in today?”
Bill shook his head. “I ate an orange in the Dublin airport just before the flight,” he said. “Does that count?”
“No,” she said, and with a smile she stamped something on his customs declaration sheet and walked on.
When we got to customs, Bill was sent one way and I was sent another.
Afterwards, when Bill came out of the customs office, he said they unpacked his carry-on and found a tiny slice of lemon in a Ziploc at the bottom of his bag. It was February, and a popular Irish winter drink is hot whiskey flavored with lemon, sugar and cloves. Somehow (don’t ask), a small wedge of lemon wrapped tightly in plastic had found its way into Bill’s bag, and the little beagle knew all about it as she ambled past.
So you don’t have to tell me about how keen a dog’s sense of smell is. I’ve seen it up close and personal.
But current research hints that a bug’s sense of smell is even keener than a dog’s is.
According to a column by Natalie Davies in the Detroit Free Press, researchers at Michigan State University have harnessed the sniffing power of live locusts to detect lung cancer cells in human breath. While current cancer scans need as many as a billion cancer cells before the disease becomes detectable in your breath, locusts can sniff it out with one-tenth as many cells.
Researchers attach tiny flexible electrodes to the locust’s brain, then connect the electrodes to a miniature electronic device that measures brain signals. When the locust smells cancer, the device lights up to tell the tale.
“They’re doing the sniffing, the chemical sensing,” says Dr. Debajit Saha, director of Michigan State’s Bioengineering of Olfactory Sensory Systems Lab. “Even after so many years of science, we’re still going back to biology to do the chemical sense. I tell people we can do amazing things like video cameras and sound systems, but we cannot do smell. For cancer, that can be game-changing.”
Of course, it takes a living bug brain to do the sensing, so the locusts must be kept alive and imprisoned by researchers while their brains are shackled to wires — which is both good news and bad news for the bug, I guess.
Still, it would be nice if future scientists could find a way to outfit the wee beastie with a Doctor Who style helmet and turn it loose in the natural world to sniff out diseases. Then it could report its findings back to base camp—like my son’s dog does with its fetchable toy of the day.
That would be a win-win situation for both bug and patient, right? The bug gets to sniff, and then sniff again another day, and the patient can spend the day in his garden instead of the doctor’s office, and let the medi-bugs come find him.
So if sometime in the near future you see a mosquito or fruit fly buzzing around your face wearing a tiny helmet and goggles, don’t squish him. He could be saving your life.
Since this whole bug-helmet thing was my idea, I’ll be waiting patiently for PETA to erect a statue of me.
And I think I smell a Nobel Prize heading my way.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.
