The past stinks

‘Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could,’ says Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park, ‘they didn’t stop to think if they should’. These, among the wisest of that fictional oracle’s many wise words, are what came to mind as I read of a whizzy new pan-European science project called Odeuropa. Historians and chemists in Holland, Germany, Italy, France and Slovenia along with colleagues at UCL and in Cambridge, have spent two years, apparently, working to synthesize the smells of the past. In Germany, they’re even training machines to recognise images relating to smell in libraries of historical images – a notable f’rinstance being pictures of people holding their noses.

They may not be in danger of unleashing pterodactyls on New York, but these Dr Strangeloves of the sinus are threatening us with something equally grim if a bit less entertaining. Among their triumphs so far, it’s reported, are a reconstruction of the odour of the canals of old Amsterdam, described as ‘a throat-catching mix of cadavers, seawater and sewage’.