The Molecule that Might End the World

“This is the way the world ends,

Not with a bang but a whimper.”

– T.S. Elliott , The Hollow Men, 1925

They tell you at TED not to start your talk with the picture of a molecule. Oh well. This cyclic organic molecule doesn’t  look like much but trust me. When you smell it, it is attractive, seductive, overwhelming, practically irresistible. It’s called galaxolide it’s a synthetic musk, one of hundreds of synthetic fragrance, and aroma molecules, and it’s widely used in thousands of products. Galaxolide won’t destroy an entire galaxy, but it just might help destroy mankind someday alongside other synthetic aroma molecules. They appear innocuous and smell delicious, but they may be insidious.

They may be killing us softly with their siren song of scent.

 The only consolation that I can offer you is that when we all go together when we go, we’ll be smelling really awesome.

My own interest in odor started some thirty years ago when  I visited a pharmaceutical company, trying to interest them in a prototype mouthwash that we were developing at Tel Aviv University. They asked me whether the formulation was active in fighting bad breath , halitosis. I became intrigued by the subject of human odors and for several decades investigated ways to measure and treat human odors. I must have smelled over five thousand mouths, underarms, shoes, saliva, feces, putrid bacteria cultures, you name it, I’ve smelled it. 

One of the lessons we learned in our investigations was just how sensitive and worried people are about how they smell, how subjective these concerns are, and to what extent having body odors impacts on relationships.  

How worried are we? Let me show you. Who in the audience who is 100% sure that he or she has absolutely no bad breath right now. I’m not seeing many hands.  So let’s do another experiment that I’ve never done before. I’m going to ask everyone who wishes to participate to raise their right hand. After I count slowly back from five, I want everyone to lean to their left and smell the armpit of the person next to you. Five, four, three, two, one, Smell. Pretty embarrassing, I reckon.

Perhaps we should be concerned about how we smell. In German and French when we want to say we can’t tolerate someone, we say “I can’t smell that person.  In Judaism, bad breath is grounds for divorce. In a British study, among various disgusting body traits, people rated body odor as the worst possible turnoff. I myself remember once dating a girl with body odor. But I only dated her once.

 In another study, 72% of the females said they would not go on a date with a guy who had bad breath.  Men were just a tad less choosy. So no wonder we want to smell our best. 

Smell is our most mysterious, primitive, primordial sense. Each of us has our own unique, signature genetic smell.  From the moment of birth, every breath we take, we are smelling and being smelled. Smell signals go straight to the emotional part of our brain, triggering strong feelings and memories. Sometimes our behavior has been altered by smelling something and we don’t even know.  Researchers recently reported that humans can smell up to one trillion odor combos.  We smell our Mom and bond with her right after being born and she smells us (not a good day, methinks, for wearing perfume). As babies we give off the delicious disarming smells that babies make.  But as we grow to sexual maturity the smell that babies make is replaced by the smells related to making babies.  The alluring smell of seduction, the aroma of you.  

Humans, after all, are animals, and animals smell each other quite a lot.

Animals decide who to mate with and when based on natural smells that they transfer, and it’s likely that we do too. At least we used to.  For  hundreds of thousands of years, we probably smelled one another and were attracted, or not. But in our brave new world, few of us smell like ourselves anymore. With the abundance of commercial scents, for a few tens of dollars we can make a complete smellover, disguising our true biological odors from our prospective mate and offering more alluring, attractive sex-soaked odors, but at the end of the day, we’re faking it. 

 To paraphrase Gordon Lightfoot, the perfume that she wore…lingered on long after she’d gone. I remember it well. Years after we forget faces, clothing, events, we still remember odors. Only now many of them are fake.   None of us smells like a natural woman, or man anymore. 

THE MUSK POD

This little pod doesn’t look like much but it’s one of the most expensive items on the planet. Two hundred years ago it was worth twice its weight in gold.  This is the real mccoy. It’s a musk pod, removed from the derriere of a male musk deer. This pod contains a concoction of extremely powerful volatile signal molecules, pheromones that the deer release to convey messages through the air, probably including those of a rather intimate nature. The sad thing for the musk deer, the civet, and a few other species, is that these signaling molecules seem to affect humans as well. 

Musk is mentioned in the ancient Jewish Talmud and was used until recently, in very small but potent doses, to top up top perfumes. You have to kill the musk deer to get the sought after pod, which resulted in the near complete extinction of the species. In future, though, they just might have their revenge on us. 

NOT A NEW THING

The seductive power of certain animal and plant extracts isn’t such a new thing.  That fever started long ago. Perfumes appeared thousands of years ago and became available to the rich and powerful in ancient Egypt, Greece and elsewhere. These concoctions were made by crushing and extracting fragrant oily extracts from plant parts, often the flowers (which I hasten to add, are sexual organs of plants, and exquisitely designed to attract insects, rather than humans). And sometimes, just a smidginin of potent animal scent. These natural perfumes were expensive, rare and exclusive, relegating most of humanity to go on loving each other, just the way we are.

SYNTHETIC AROMAS

But in the nineteenth century  clever organic chemists started to understand the chemistry of natural aroma molecules and began synthesizing cheap artificial scent molecules, imitating the aroma of vanilla, flowers, fruits, and nuts and eventually they began to synthesize molecules giving off musk-like odors. 

In 1888, a chemist named Bauer chanced upon the first nitromusk while working on TNT development. The nitro-musks were quite literally, explosive and were replaced in the 1960s by more modern synthetic cyclic molecules, such as galaxolide. 

GALAXOLIDE

Synthetic musk is, today, as cheap as borscht. Bought in bulk, it’s less than ten dollars a kilo, which makes a hundred thousand times cheaper than the original. And given it’s seductive character, it goes into almost everything – fine fragrance, cosmetics, hair conditioners, laundry detergents, fabric softeners, soap, and perhaps even pear juice. It’s all over, and inside my body, right now.  And yours. Galaxolide is mentioned in over 7000 patents and patent applications. One kilogram can scent a thousand bottles of perfume. And each year well over 10 million kilograms of galaxolide are sold. 

Is there a problem bathing yourself in and ingesting a synthetic musk analogue? Who really knows?

I asked my friend, Dr. Paul D. Blanc, an international expert in toxicology, and he answered with a report in “Psychology Today”, in which he cited some troubling research. These articles suggest that galaxolide is

“nearly ubiquitous, not only detectable in water supplies in a number of locations sampled, but also being the most abundant synthetic musk chemical among those analyzed. Moreover, not only is galaxolide persistent in the environment, it also appears to bio-accumulate in some species, its concentration increasing up the food chain.” It’s detectable in humans, including breast milk, and MOST IMPORTANTLY it may interfere with  estrogen hormonal function. 

Blanc continues “Of course, maybe this shouldn’t be surprising of a chemical mimic of a substance that naturally plays a role in the mating practices of certain mammals”.

Don’t bother looking on the packaging of your hand cream, lipstick, pot pourri, incense, detergent or hand soap.  Synthetic musks are part of the fragrance component, are not individually listed on the retail product. They are not well regulated.  They are cheap, they are beguiling and cosmetic companies use them by tens of thousands. Of tons. Each year.  

What can we do, On a personal level, we can cut down on using scented products, if we have the urge to use a perfume we can apply it to clothing rather than the skin. On a national note, we should do more research to look into their potential harm on mating. Human mating.

Of course, the companies producing and selling products with galaxolide would argue that they are safe, and this argument will continue while the environment becomes increasingly polluted by this persistent molecule, and it builds up within each of our bodies, interfering in mate selection and perhaps in the biology of reproduction itself.

So in a future world, maybe a few decades or centuries hence, when we humans have increasing troubles bringing babies to the world, we may regret that we did not pay more attention to these otherwise-attractive stealth molecules that may disturb our our finely tuned biological systems.

In 1920, Coco Chanel first sampled the perfume labeled “Number five”, containing a powerful blend of synthetic and natural musk.

In the very same year, Robert Frost wrote his classic poem, “Fire and Ice””. It starts:

“Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.”

I also hold with those who favor fire. The fire of desire.

So you can go on worrying about nuclear destruction, plagues and asteroids if you wish. And I’ll continue to worry about us being led by our noses to self-destruction.

But in the meantime, why not just turn out the lights and come to bed, my deer.