Christina Kim
speaker
90 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Christina Kim’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Before we get started, a note to listeners that this episode includes exploration of racist material.
Ever since I was a little girl, I've been enveloped by the smell of lemon, rosemary, and spices. It's the smell of this Spanish perfume called Álvarez Gómez Agua de Colonia, the classic fragrance that's been made in Spain since 1912, that my grandmother, mi yaya, and my mother have always worn.
It's the smell of my yaya sitting on the couch in Madrid, with her legs crossed, wearing her kitten heel house slippers, reminiscing about being a little bit wild, un poco traviesa, as she reaches over with her soft hand to give mine a squeeze.
It's the smell of my mom running after me whenever I'm in my childhood home in California, with a bottle of it, trying to spritz some over my head, a fuss-fuss before we leave the house to smell fresh. And the smell of her reassuring hugs, which let me know I am never alone. SIGHS The top note is crisp, sharp, like a Mediterranean lemon whose yellow-hued brightness makes my nose tingle. SIGHS
Once I let the inhale get to my chest, I reach the fragrance's heart note, and it becomes more green and fresh. And finally, when my breath makes it all the way to my belly... The base note rounds everything together. It's like the umami part of the fragrance, this kind of fullness and richness that expands throughout my whole body, like a soft hug, like home.
The act of smelling a perfume is like hearing a full orchestra. In order to actually smell it, your nose has to parse through thousands of different molecules, translate them, and then transmit it to your brain so that you can smell what you recognize as your favorite scent. Be it a perfume or a rose. And that's just what has to happen to smell a single thing.
The reality is that for most of us, our noses are parsing through a massive number of different odor molecules a day. And it's so easy to take this riot of smell for granted. Unless it disappears. In the summer of 2022, I became one of the 15 million estimated people to have lost their sense of smell because of COVID.
The minute I noticed that I wasn't able to smell anything, I ran around from room to room sniffing anything I could get my hands on. I went to the kitchen and opened a jar of peanut butter. Nothing. I took a spoonful of peanut butter and put it in my mouth. Instead of the sweet, salty, nutty flavor I expected, all I could sense was how it felt.
A thick, flavorless paste sticking to my tongue and gums. Finally, I ran to my bedside table where I kept my giant glass art deco bottle of Alvarez Gomez Agua de Colonia. I took a big breath, waiting for the fresh herbal scents to take over and make me feel better. But all that I inhaled was an empty void of what I knew was there, but I could no longer access.
It felt like my tie to my mom and my grandmother was severed. After I gathered myself, I did what any journalist would do next. Hello? Okay, you are here. Okay, wonderful. And that meant calling up someone who's dedicated their life to studying and understanding smell.
Rachel is the person for all things smell. She's the author of The Scent of Desire, Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell. And she immediately empathized with how I was feeling.
But even though our sense of smell is such an important facet of our lives, it turns out we still don't seem to know that much about it.
The deeper I dug into what we know about smell, the more I started to realize how much our sense of smell has shaped not just our personal experiences, but also the world we live in and our understanding of the past and the present. And it got me thinking about how smell is kind of like the science of history because it's so wrapped up in who we think we are and how we remember the past.
which kind of makes it the perfect ThruLine episode. So here we go. I'm Christina Kim, and today on ThruLine from NPR, I'm asking you to go on a little adventure to unpack the enigma of smell.
We're going to explore how olfaction actually works, from our nose to our brain, how smell has been used to legally divide us, and finally, how harnessing our sense of smell and memory can make us all into time travelers. Coming up first, how we know what we know about the science of smell.
It's 1988, and a young scientist named Linda Buck is sitting in a laboratory at Columbia University, struggling to wrap her brain around a question.
This is Linda Buck's voice from an interview she did with the American Academy of Achievement. She sat at her desk in the lab, astonished by a simple reality. One of nature's elegant designs. One many of us take for granted. I know I did. Smell. Well, at that point in 1988, scientists didn't really understand it at all.
It may seem unbelievable, but scientists didn't understand exactly how the nose and brain were able to process and make sense of the wide range of chemicals we breathe in.
From that research bench at Columbia, Linda began her quest to understand how the sense of smell worked.
Linda, along with her mentor Richard Axel, invested much of her time in this research. Research that was not well-funded and largely ignored. And she passed on other job offers to study other topics along the way.
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