Free Republic

Dogs have long been used by police forces to detect drugs and explosives. But now animals and machines are being trained and developed to sniff out a person's potential for aggression, if they are feeling guilty - even their race. I was walking into Fulham Broadway underground station a couple of years ago when I saw police officers holding dogs on leashes, encouraging them to sniff the crotches of passing commuters. What, I asked one of the policemen, was the purpose of this operation? "I can't say," he replied.

Two American scientists who solved the enigma of how people can smell 10,000 different odors and recall them later were awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine yesterday. The winners, who will share the $1.3 million award, were Dr. Richard Axel, 58, a professor at Columbia University, and Dr. Linda B. Buck, 57, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. Until publication of their fundamental paper in 1991, the sense of smell had been "the most enigmatic of our senses," the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute in...

Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded to Axel and Buck for research into the sense of smell | By Stephen Pincock Richard Axel, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Columbia University, NY, and Linda B. Buck from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Wash., have been awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet said the two researchers were being recognized for their discovery of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system. Their seminal paper, in which they described the large family of roughly 1000 genes for odorant receptors,...