Chemical Senses Advance Access originally published online on August 28, 2008
Chemical Senses 2008 33(8):683-684; doi:10.1093/chemse/bjn050
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Letter to the Editor
Center for Biomedical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 500 Technology Sq., Cambridge, MA
Correspondence to be sent to: Luca Turin, Center for Biomedical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 500 Technology Sq., Cambridge, MA. e-mail: turin@mit.edu
| The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below. |
This journal recently published a review of the paperback edition of my book The Secret of Scent. The reviewer is free to disagree with the ideas, of course, but inaccurate criticism expressed as ad hominem arguments should not be acceptable in any responsible journal. He dismisses one class of mechanisms proposed (in the same journal, incidentally) for primary olfactory reception as a "myth", "alchemy", and "contrary to facts and basic scientific principles". These claims are based on a number of straightforward errors on his part. I write to correct the record.
The reviewer claims I invented the long-established technique of inelastic electron tunneling
He states that inelastic electron
The reviewer does not accept that different spectroscopies have different selection rules
The reviewer is unwilling to accept that boranes smell sulfuraceous, despite never having smelled them
The reviewer, although unfamiliar with the significant number of isotope experiments, is nonetheless adamant that no isotope effects exist
The reviewer fails to accept that electrochemical reactions involve both electrons and chemistry
The reviewer claims all is well in the understanding of smell so a spectroscopic theory is unnecessary