Eau de poop: Bill Gates tests a new way to sweeten the world’s worst odors
Bill Gates is well known as an enthusiastic investor in biotech, both as a tech mogul as well as a leader of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is always on the hunt for new drugs that can benefit the world’s poor.
Now, he’s taking a molecular-level interest in smells.
It turns out that of about 350 olfactory receptors in the brain, only a handful are used to recognize foul odors, even though there are hundreds of chemical compounds included in the world’s worst smells. At Gates’ request, a Swiss company named Firmenich created a fragrance that blocks those specific receptors. So when Gates was recently exposed to a smell that combines the worst of sewage, sweat and overripe cheese, all he got was the sweetness from the fragrance they concocted. The smell was blocked.
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