Luca Turin (born 20 November 1953) is a biophysicist and writer with a long-standing interest in bioelectronics, the sense of smell, perfumery, and the fragrance industry.
[10] 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.
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.
"[12] The journal also published a review of The Emperor of Scent, calling Chandler Burr's book about Turin and his theory "giddy and overwrought.
[19] Two years later, in 2013, Turin and colleagues published a study in PLoS ONE showing that humans easily distinguish gas-chromatography-purified deuterated musk in double-blind tests.
[21] In response to Turin's 2013 paper, involving deuterated and undeuterated isotopomers of the musk cyclopentadecanone,[20] Block et al. in a 2015 paper in PNAS[22] report that the human musk-recognizing receptor, OR5AN1, identified using a heterologous olfactory receptor expression system and robustly responding to cyclopentadecanone and muscone (which has 30 hydrogens), fails to distinguish isotopomers of these compounds in vitro.
The authors conclude: "These and other concerns about electron transfer at olfactory receptors, together with our extensive experimental data, argue against the plausibility of the vibration theory."
[28] Turin's recent work focuses on the relevance of his olfaction theory to more general mechanisms of G-protein coupled receptor activation.
A 2019 preprint[30] argues that the highest-resolution x-ray diffraction structure of rhodopsin,[31] considered the ancestor of all GPCRs, contains the elements of an electronic circuit.
There, Turin and his colleague Nicole Ropert reported to their superiors that they believed some of Korn's research on neurotransmitters was based on fabricated results.
[33] After Turin made a formal request that the CNRS investigate the allegations, he was told to find work outside France; Ropert was also asked to leave.
Since 2003, Turin has also written a regular column on perfume, "Duftnote," for NZZ Folio, the German-language monthly magazine of Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung.