Scientist Explains Why Dogs Can Smell Better Than Robots

I am appalled.

I am upset.

Pissed off to the fact that I have access

to $100 million dollars worth of equipment

and I still cannot do as good at cancer diagnosis as

the humblest dog that has been trained for a few months.

MIT's Andreas Mershin thinks an artificial nose could

become the most powerful diagnostic tool

in history and remake medicine forever,

which is why he's been working on building a machine

that works as well as a dog's nose to create

Artificial Olfaction or machine olfaction.

That means putting a nose in your phone.

After all, dogs can detect explosives with their noses

and sniff out all sorts of medical conditions

from seizures to diabetes to cancers

with up to 98% accuracy in some cases.

But when Mershin set out to make a robotic nose,

he realized how little we even know about how smell works.

What are the major benefits

of my phone being able to smell me?

Your phone already has an eye.

It's called a camera.

It has an ear.

It's called a microphone.

It needs to have a nose.

Now why does it need to have a nose?

Why does your cell phone need to have a nose?

It needs to have a nose to save your life.

See this mole I have here?

Yeah, it might turn melanoma tomorrow.

I won't know.

It won't change shape or color.

My dog, if I dog trained to detect skin cancer

would tell immediately.

Now, you wait six months and it might be a death sentence.

Early diagnosis that the dogs can do routinely

is the difference between life and death.

If you have a diabetic child,

you have to prick their finger every two hours

while they're asleep.

Imagine a situation of having to live

in that kind of family.

Your life is controlled by this disease.

A dog can cure this

by sleeping on a different floor then the baby,

he will alert you minutes, minutes,

before there is a problem.

If my phone smells me day in day out,

learns what my normal scent is

and alerts me to a medical condition

so that it can save my life, that is a good thing.

I want the phone to do this.

We're already carrying these things.

We're already literally sleeping with these things.

These things need to do more for us.

So I read that dogs are 90% accurate

if they've been trained at detecting things

like prostate cancer.

I was wondering if you could run through

what else dogs can detect.

So far, we haven't found something that they can't detect.

Every cancer that has ever been tried to be detected

by dogs has actually been detected successfully.

Not every cancer has been tried.

Everything else that we have tried properly,

or even at all I think,

including Malaria and Parkinson's has worked.

That doesn't mean the dogs are magical.

Doesn't mean that there's no limit to what they can do,

it's just that we haven't found the ceiling yet.

Some of these dogs, when they are trained on one cancer,

let's say bladder cancer,

they will spontaneously recognize a different type

of cancer that has no identical volatiles.

No other system in the world does this.

Nothing does this.

What a good girl.

Dogs are the earliest, least false positive,

least false negatives, cheapest,

fastest cancer detectors we have.

It seems like the dogs are reading the molecules.

You know, the volatile molecules that come into their nose.

They're reading them but they're not reading just them.

They're reading something written on top of that.

It's like the molecules are the fonts

but the message is in the dog's mind

to be able to interpret the font.

The font?.

The font, yeah!

The molecules are the font!

The message, cancer, no cancer, bad cancer, good cancer,

which the dogs can tell us, is not written

on anything that has to do with the

structure of each molecule.

It is emerged by something that

the dogs do as observers of this.

Why are dogs so much better than us,

and better than computers currently at smelling disease?

The facetious, but 90% true answer is

because their nose is closer to the ground.

Here's why.

Most of the odorants,

the molecules that confer the sense of scent

[mumbles] surfaces.

Leaves, soil, wall, et cetera.

Having your nose close to the surface

makes you more acutely aware of it

and it makes it more important to your universe.

Dogs are very, very keen on reading their universe

using their nose,

almost as keen as we are

reading our universe, using our eyes.

They see things in the ground that we don't see.

If you look at where somebody has stepped

with an infrared camera, if they not wearing any shoes,

you will see there's steps left behind as heat.

The dog sees the same image only using his or her nose.

They see where somebody has been by ingesting and

processing this bloom of odorants.

What is the biggest challenge with artificial olfaction?

The biggest challenge with artificial olfaction, I think

is still in the psychological realm, its not longer in the

technological realm.

We have the devices that can detect odorants to a lower

concentration that the best known available biological

nose can do.

But what were trying to understand,

isn't how the dogs can detect the odorants,

we already know that.

We built dog analog as far as detection layer goes,

but we haven't built is the dogs intelligence layer.

How does a dog, upon training realize what is what?

How far are away are we from having

your artificial nose in a phone?

I do not know the answer to how long

until my device is in your phone.

What will happen once its in there,

we will enter a whole new era of medicine.

Its as simple as that.

What can building an artificial nose, tell us about

how scent works?

We thought that when you sniff something,

what happens is, you get a whole list of molecules by name

and concentration.

It's like a recipe, if I tell you the recipe of a perfume.

All the molecules as a list of names and concentration,

will will you know what it smells like?

No, neither will a chemist.

Neither will somebody whose trained very well,

they will still be surprised.

The only thing we know in science, kind of, that is legit,

and sort of ambiguous and that we havn't seen

as an exception, is that nothing above,

about 400 molecular weight smells.

That's all we know.

I always thought that in order to build something,

you need to know how it works, and then you build it?

But if you really think about it,

that's not how the world works.

The Wright Brothers did not know how flight works.

Yet they built a plane, then we understood how flight works.

[Voiceover] The air age was here.

We did not know how a nose works, we built a nose, now

we understand how it works.

In building it, we were actually slapped by the universe

into understanding how olfaction actually works, okay.

That meaning you attach to scent,

has to do with your experience with it.

At the same time, there's some meanings that are attached

there before you even get born.

What [mumbles], my daughter taught me this.

My daughter was three when I was changing

my son's diaper who was one at the time.

She comes into the room and says: What's that smell Daddy?

I asked her a question.

What does the smell tell you?

I don't want to eat!

Exactly, right?

That smells lousy and you don't want to eat it!

[bleep] literally.

I want our phones to smell us.

If my phone smells me day in and day out,

and learn what my normal scent is,

and alerts me to a medical condition,

so they can save my life, that is a good thing.

When I'm pregnant, my sense of smell

because of hormones is hyper-active

and I can smell so many different things.

What does artificial olfaction, tell us about subjective

olfaction in biological beings?

If you're pregnant, scent character changes.

That's just an exaggerated instance

of something that happens to all us all the time.

The olfactory palette of the human is

about 30% [mumbles] from human to human.

When you re pregnant, you're not more subjective, you're

more in a sense objective.

Your body tells you what you need and don't need by

modulating your wants and desires from

the olfactory spectrum.

For instance my wife, she is obsessed with coffee,

and when she's pregnant she hates coffee.

Which is insane because my wife will drink coffee at 3 A.M.

but not when she pregnant.

Now what does that mean?

That means that your body is taking control

over your perception.

Its called perceptual enduring, your body knows that there

is something important going on that needs to engineer

your perception towards different things.

It makes you want, and look at, and

pay attention to different things,

and olfaction has a big way of doing this under the radar.

You don't even know that its happening.

The amount of things that olfaction plugs into,

as far as your behavior goes, is insane.

Some people are blind to certain odors, same as colors.

You might perceive a sensation of odor, scent,

that might, or might not cause you to

behave a certain way.

Be averse, be attracted, be say, hmm I want to eat this,

hmm I don't want to eat this.

Things like this, right?

Similar to vision, you might see

something you're attracted to, you might see

something you want to run away from, right?

Having a sense of smell, it can be also

predictive of health, right, and losing your sense of smell

in some cases, I've seen research , can be an indicator

of dementia later on?

Very much so, in fact the most accurate predictor

of Alzheimer's that we have currently,

as far as I understand, is a decrement in the threshold of

detection of certain odorants.

How about this, if you have this,

say early onset like Parkinson's, which is a

documented case, you will start being less able to

discriminate between let's say garlic and onion.

I read that 53% of young people would

rather lose heir sense of scent, and their sense of smell

that lose their phone.

Which I think --

[laughing]

Brings to mind the idea that scent and the sense of smell,

is a really undervalued sense.

No, it brings the idea that phones are

a very valuable thing.

I would lose my sense of smell, before I lose my phone,

and I am a smell researcher.

Wow!

Because this thing gives me power, more power than

my nose does.

Andreas, let me ask you, and you just said,

and I was frankly, shocked, that you would rather give up

your sense of smell, than give up your cellphone.

Would you only do that if you were, if you knew your phone

would be equipped with a sense of smell?

I would not give up my sense of vision, okay?

That's too important but my sense of smell,

the kind of way that I'm using it,

is not important enough for me.

Yes, it is good to have my [mumbles] nose,

most people don't use it!

The body can do incredible things, do most of us use it?

This has been fascinating, I have,

thank you so much for your time.

You guys are great, thank you.