The Emperor of Scent

Chandler Burr's account follows Luca Turin, a scientist with an uncanny gift for smell whom some have likened to the hero of Perfume, the novel by Patrick Suskind. Working in an unrelated field, Turin collected fragrances as a hobby, and when he published his reviews of the world's perfumes almost on a whim, the guide shook the small, closed business of perfume makers. Inside that world he found that nobody knew how smell worked, and that vast sums went into creating scents by trial and error. Drawing on biology, chemistry and physics, he set out an outrageous new theory of the human sense of smell, one that threatened influential interests and established reputations. Burr spent four years chronicling the story.

Eric Weinstein, managing director of Thiel Capital, asks his science friends to read it, describing his friend Luca Turin as a renegade scientist blocked by the journal Nature and established research centers, and the story as a fine introduction to how dissenting voices get pushed aside.