Disabled genes dull sense of smell
By John Travis
You wouldn’t guess from the proliferation of perfumes and underarm deodorants, but people have a woeful sense of smell compared with many other residents of the animal kingdom.
Simply put, we offer no competition to bloodhounds or bunnies.
With little data to go on, scientists have proposed several theories to explain this olfactory inequality. The latest blames it on our genes. In 1998, Dominique Giorgi of the Institute of Human Genetics in Montpellier, France, and colleagues reported that more than 70 percent of the human genes encoding olfactory receptors—the cell-surface proteins used to detect smells—possess disabling mutations. The researchers hypothesized that this unexpected predominance of so-called pseudogenes accounts for the poor human sense of smell.