Perfumery, Science

Fragrant exhibits at the MIT Museum

Yesterday we finally got to visit the relocated and revamped MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was larger than I expected and quite impressive in the variety of collections. I had heard there was an exhibit of the recreated scent of an extinct flower, which of course became my priority. As it turned out, there were not one but two scented displays, both in the Gene Cultures exhibition! (If there were more, I missed them.)

Resurrecting the Sublime, 2019

By artists: Christina Agapakis, Creative Director of Ginkgo Bioworks; Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg; Sissel Tolaas

Visitors are invited to stand under a cube (a “smell diffusion hood”) that detects your presence and pumps out scent. While parsing the fragrance, you can fix your gaze on a video that shows the simulated landscape in which the now-extinct Orbexilum stipulatum, or Falls-of-the-Ohio scurf pea, may have grown.

The plaque explains that “Ginkgo’s scientists extracted DNA from specimens stored at Harvard University’s Herbaria, then used synthetic biology to predict and resynthesize gene sequences expected to encode for fragrance-producing enzymes. Tolaas then used identical or comparative smell molecules to try to reconstruct the smell of the [flower] last seen in 1881 on Rock Island, near Louisville, Kentucky. Its island habitat was then lost forever with the construction of a dam in the 1920s.”

IFF is also credited, so presumably they supplied the ingredients.

The first time I went under the cube, the scent was very faint and yet familiar. Watery green, like lily-of-the-valley… something cool like concrete, maybe… My other half said it was “minty,” which probably explained the coolness. I was ready to settle for the vague impression, but after walking around and seeing the rest of the museum, I decided to go back and smell it again. This time, it was more distinct, and I also picked up notes of ylang-ylang, a very dry and astringent cedarwood (like Cedramber), and possibly orris or at least ionones.

It was challenging to imagine all of these notes emanating from a flower, but perhaps that in itself makes a point about the abstraction.

Supermarket Mutants, 2013

By: Center for Genomic Gastronomy

I did not know about this one in advance, but was instantly drawn to the arrow labeled “Smell this mutation-bred peppermint” pointing to a circle. This particular display is titled Mutagenic Mint and is part of a “triptych” of works on mutation breeding.

Per the plaque, mutation breeding is “a century-old agricultural technology that has proliferated globally since the end of World War II. Scientists have deliberately exposed plants and seeds to radiation and chemicals over decades, inducing mutations and developing new commercial crop varieties. These organisms populate our human food systems and sit anonymously on our supermarket shelves.”

Sure enough, the radiation-bred variety of peppermint smells just like your typical toothpaste or chewing-gum mint.

No surprises there… which to me, subconsciously, might have been a surprise.

12 thoughts on “Fragrant exhibits at the MIT Museum”

  2. Fascinating!
    I meant to ask for a while: do you attend many different exhibitions, events, museums and just happen to come across those perfume-related ones, or do you seek them out? If the latter, how do you do that?

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    1. In this case, a coworker who knows I’m into scent told me about this exhibit, although I would have gone to the MIT Museum at some point anyway as it’s relatively local to me. If I’m going to a major city like New York, I might look up whether there are any scent-related events or exhibitions. Some I learn about from other blogs. I’m also subscribed to Olfactory Art Keller’s newsletter and it regularly includes lists of current olfactory exhibits in various countries. Nez magazine lists some too, but they are usually in Europe…

      What about you? Do you have other methods of finding them?

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  4. What fantastic exhibits! I wonder if the new interest in the sense of smell after C-19 will mean an increase in these sorts of exhibits in future?
    I guess breeding for certain traits initially from ‘natural’ mutations has been going on for centuries.
    Hairless cats & Brachycephalic dogs?

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