The study was accompanied by an editorial, which considered the work of Keller and Vosshall to be 'refutation of a theory that, while provocative, has almost no credence in scientific circles.' It continued, 'The only reason for the authors to do the study, or for Nature Neuroscience to publish it, is the extraordinary - and inappropriate - degree of publicity that the theory has received from uncritical journalists.' The journal also published a review of The Emperor of Scent, calling Chandler Burr's book about Turin and his theory 'giddy and overwrought.'

However, experimental tests published in Nature Neuroscience in 2004 by Keller and Vosshall failed to support this prediction, with human subjects unable to distinguish acetophenone and its deuterated counterpart. showed humans able to distinguish benzaldehyde from its deuterated version. Turin suggested that a plausible mechanism for such a molecular spectroscope could be inelastic electron tunneling.Ī major prediction of Turin's theory is the isotope effect: that the normal and deuterated versions of a compound should smell different due to unique vibration frequencies, despite having the same shape. Since 1996 Turin has been the leading proponent of the vibration theory of olfaction, which proposes that the vibrational spectroscopic properties of molecules can be an important determinant of their associated smells, rather than just the specific ' lock and key' ligand binding proposed by the orthodox shape theory of olfaction.

Luca turin tania sanchez