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Luca Turin | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1953-11-20)20 November 1953 (age 71) |
| Occupation | biophysicist |
| Known for | Vibration theory of olfaction |
Luca Turin (born 20 November 1953) is abiophysicist and writer with a long-standing interest in bioelectronics, the sense of smell, perfumery, and thefragrance industry.
Turin was born inBeirut,Lebanon on 20 November 1953 into an Italian-Argentinian family, and raised in France, Italy and Switzerland. His father, Duccio Turin, was aUN diplomat and chief architect of the Palestinian refugee camps,[1] and his mother, Adela Turin (born Mandelli), is an art historian, designer, and award-winning children's author.[2] Turin studiedPhysiology and Biophysics atUniversity College London and earned his PhD in 1978.[3] He worked at the CNRS from 1982-1992, and served as lecturer inBiophysics at University College London from 1992-2000.
After leaving theCNRS, Turin first held a visiting research position at theNational Institutes of Health inNorth Carolina[4] before moving back toLondon, where he became a lecturer in biophysics atUniversity College London. In 2001 Turin was hired asCTO of start-up company Flexitral, based inChantilly, Virginia, to pursue rational odorant design based on his theories. In April 2010 he described this role in the past tense,[5] and the company's domain name appears to have been surrendered.[6]
In 2010, Turin was based atMIT, working on a project to develop anelectronic nose using natural receptors, financed byDARPA.[5] In 2014 he moved to the Institute of Theoretical Physics at theUniversity of Ulm where he was a Visiting Professor.[7] He is a Stavros Niarchos Researcher[8] in the neurobiology division at the Biomedical Sciences Research Center Alexander Fleming in Greece.[9] In 2021 he moved to the University of Buckingham, UK as Professor of Physiology in the Medical School.
A major prediction ofTurin's vibration theory of olfaction is theisotope effect: that the normal anddeuterated versions of a compound should smell different due to unique vibration frequencies, despite having the same shape. A 2001 study by Haffenden et al. showed humans able to distinguishbenzaldehyde from its deuterated version.[10]
However, experimental tests published inNature Neuroscience in 2004 byKeller andVosshall failed to support this prediction, with human subjects unable to distinguishacetophenone and its deuterated counterpart.[11] The study was accompanied by an editorial, which considered the work of Keller and Vosshall to be "refutation of a theory that, while provocative, has almost no credence in scientific circles." It continued, "The only reason for the authors to do the study, or forNature Neuroscience to publish it, is the extraordinary -- and inappropriate -- degree of publicity that the theory has received from uncritical journalists."[12] The journal also published a review ofThe Emperor of Scent, calling Chandler Burr's book about Turin and his theory "giddy and overwrought."[13]However, tests with animals have shown fish and insects able to distinguish isotopes by smell.[14][15] Biophysical simulations published inPhysical Review Letters in 2007 suggest that Turin's proposal is viable from a physics standpoint.[16]
The vibration theory received possible support from a 2004 paper published in the journal Organic Biomolecular Chemistry by Takane and Mitchell, which shows that odor descriptions in the olfaction literature correlate more strongly with vibrational frequency than with molecular shape.[17]
In 2011, Turin and colleagues published a paper inPNAS showingdrosophila fruit flies can distinguish between odorants and their deuterated counterparts. Tests on drosophila differ from human experiments by using an animal subject known to have a good sense of smell and free from psychological biases that may complicate human tests.[18] Drosophila were trained to avoid the deuterated odorant in a deuterated/normal pair, indicating a difference in odor. Furthermore, drosophila trained to avoid one deuterated odorant also avoided other deuterated odorants, chemically unrelated, indicating that the deuterated bond itself had a distinct smell. The authors identified a vibrational frequency that could be responsible and found it close to one found in nitriles. When flies trained to avoid deuterated odorants were exposed to the nitrile and its non-nitrile counterpart, the flies also avoided the nitrile, consistent with the theory that fly olfaction detects molecular vibrations.[19]
Two years later, in 2013, Turin and colleagues published a study inPLoS ONE showing that humans easily distinguishgas-chromatography-purified deuteratedmusk in double-blind tests. The team chose musks due to the high number of carbon-hydrogen bonds available for deuteration. They replicated the earlier results of Vosshall and Keller showing that humans cannot reliably distinguish between acetophenone and its deuterated counterpart, with 8 hydrogens, and showed that humans only begin to detect the isotope odor of the musks beginning at 14 deuteriums, or 50% deuteration.[20] Because Turin's proposed mechanism is a biological method ofinelastic electron tunnelling spectroscopy, which exploits a quantum effect, his theory of olfaction mechanism has been described as an example ofquantum biology.[21]
In response to Turin's 2013 paper, involving deuterated and undeuteratedisotopomers of the musk cyclopentadecanone,[20] Block et al. in a 2015 paper inPNAS[22] report that the humanmusk-recognizing receptor, OR5AN1, identified using a heterologousolfactory receptor expression system and robustly responding to cyclopentadecanone andmuscone (which has 30 hydrogens), fails to distinguishisotopomers of these compounds in vitro. Furthermore, the mouse (methylthio)methanethiol-recognizing receptor, MOR244-3, as well as other selected human and mouseolfactory receptors, responded similarly to normal, deuterated, and carbon-13 isotopomers of their respective ligands, paralleling results found with the musk receptor OR5AN1. Based on these findings, the authors conclude that the proposedvibration theory of olfaction does not apply to the human musk receptor OR5AN1, mouse thiol receptor MOR244-3, or otherolfactory receptors examined. Additionally, theoretical analysis by the authors shows that the proposedelectron transfer mechanism of the vibrational frequencies of odorants could be easily suppressed by quantum effects of nonodorant molecular vibrational modes. The authors conclude: "These and other concerns aboutelectron transfer at olfactory receptors, together with our extensive experimental data, argue against the plausibility of thevibration theory." In commenting on this work,Vosshall writes "In PNAS, Block et al…. shift the "shape vs. vibration" debate from olfactory psychophysics to the biophysics of the ORs themselves. The authors mount a sophisticated multidisciplinary attack on the central tenets of thevibration theory using synthetic organic chemistry, heterologous expression ofolfactory receptors, and theoretical considerations to find no evidence to support thevibration theory of smell."[23] WhileTurin comments that Block used "cells in a dish rather than within whole organisms" and that "expressing anolfactory receptor inhuman embryonic kidney cells doesn't adequately reconstitute the complex nature ofolfaction...",Vosshall responds "Embryonic kidney cells are not identical to the cells in the nose .. but if you are looking at receptors, it's the best system in the world."[24] In a Letter to the Editor ofPNAS, Turin et al.[25] raise concerns about Block et al.[22] and Block et al. respond.[26] A recent study[27] describes the responses of primary olfactory neurons in tissue culture to isotopes and finds that a small fraction of the population (<1%) clearly discriminates between isotopes, some even giving an all-or-or -none response to H or D isotopomers of octanal. The authors attribute this to "hypersensitivity" of some receptors to differences in hydrophobicity between normal and deuterated odorants.
Turin filed one of the first patents for a semiconductor device made with protein.[28] Turin's recent work focuses on the relevance of his olfaction theory to more general mechanisms of G-protein coupled receptor activation. In an article[29] in Inference Review, he proposed that the electronic mechanism was a special case of a more general involvement of electron currents in GPCRs. A 2019 preprint[30] argues that the highest-resolution x-ray diffraction structure of rhodopsin,[31] considered the ancestor of all GPCRs, contains the elements of an electronic circuit. He has also reported detection of non-equilibrium electron spins in Drosophila by their radiofrequency emissions,[32] though this is described as a "work in progress".
In 1988, Turin began work at the lab led byneuroscience researcherHenri Korn at thePasteur Institute. There, Turin and his colleague Nicole Ropert reported to their superiors that they believed some of Korn's research onneurotransmitters was based on fabricated results.[33] After Turin made a formal request that the CNRS investigate the allegations, he was told to find work outside France; Ropert was also asked to leave.[34]
Korn was awarded the prestigiousRichard Lounsbery Award in 1992 and became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S. and the French Academy of Sciences.[35] Then in 2007, re-analysis of Korn's data byJacques Ninio in theJournal of Neurophysiology showed serious anomalies that suggested the results were indeed fabricated.[33]
Turin is the author of the bookThe Secret of Scent (2006), which details the history and science of his theory of olfaction; an acclaimed critical guide to perfume in French,Parfums: Le Guide, with two editions in 1992 and 1994; and is co-author of the English-language booksPerfumes: The A-Z Guide (2008) andThe Little Book of Perfumes (2011). He is also the subject of the 2002 bookThe Emperor of Scent byChandler Burr[4] and the 1995 BBC Horizons documentary "A Code in the Nose."
Since 2003, Turin has also written a regular column on perfume, "Duftnote," forNZZ Folio, the German-language monthly magazine of Swiss newspaperNeue Zürcher Zeitung. The column is also published in English on the magazine's website.[36] The column ended in 2014. The collected columns are published as a book[37]
In 2001 and 2004, Turin won the Prix Jasmin, the highest honor for perfume writing in France. He won the Jasmine Prize in the UK in 2009.[38]
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Je leur ai expliqué la situation. J'ai dit que le devoir d'un scientifique était d'établir la vérité et que je m'étais trouvé dans un laboratoire dont le directeur agissait comme un faussaire. On m'a répondu que j'avais cinq jours pour me trouver un autre poste, de préférence hors de France !
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