Creating a Small Blip on the Radar Screen of Humanity

Somewhere around 5:30 am each morning I roll out of bed and roll up to my computer. Blurry eyed, before I brew up my first cup of tea, I grab the mouse and check Google, searching the phrase “taste & smell patents”, recording the results. On October 12th the number is 5,070. Five days earlier, the same search produced only 2 results.

The online reputation of the DaVinci Institute is a huge factor in determining cash flow. Consequently we spend most of our days trying to figure out how to create more buzz.

2004 has been a very difficult year for us here at the Institute. With the elections sucking almost all the money out of the non-profit world, and a struggling economy in Colorado, we resort to unusual tactics to survive.

Some call what we do guerilla marketing, but its more than that. Bootstrapping is now a way of life, and we find the tools at our disposal now and mechanisms for influencing our online reputation continuing to grow exponentially. But it’s tricky. The online world will quickly turn against us if we make a mistake.

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Roughly ten years ago I was involved in a conversation with some patent attorneys over the question of whether someone could patent a smell. The conclusion they reached was yes, as long as there was some system in place for defining smells.Enter the October 4, 2004 announcement that two Americans were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering how people can recognize and remember an estimated 10,000 smells, ranging from smelly garbage to expensive perfume.

The two researchers, Dr. Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck, won the prize for scientifically describing how odor-sensing proteins in the nose translate specific tastes and smells into information in the brain.

Their breakthrough stemmed from a 1991 discovery of a family of genes devoted to producing different odor-sensing proteins, called receptors, in the nose. Their work showed that people have a few hundred types of odor receptors, each of which can detect only a limited number of odors.

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