Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/03/does-cyanide-really-smell-like-almonds-an-investigation.html
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Years ago when I was shopping around for GCMS units, the salesmen made a very excellent point:
“You already own the most sophisticated analyzer on the planet.” (meaning our tongue and olfactory system)
Which is why:
a) They are, otherwise you wouldn’t have smelled anything.
and
b) The average person, not having the luxury of smelling such a deadly compound, can still recognize the minuscule amount present in almonds. We don’t usually smell things in isolation, but in aggregate. Freshly mowed grass and the smell of fresh rain are aggregates of thousands of detectable molecules. If one molecule were isolated, many people would probably still say it smells like the aggregate.
Also, this is why Meyer’s cleaning products smell terrible to me. They are narrow molecular reconstructions of lavender or lemon or whatever. Without the context of the whole extract, they just hint at what they’re supposed to represent.
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I remember years ago this connection was mentioned, then it was a deluge of Murder She Wrote/crime/mystery shows that jumped on this and you couldn’t escape the scene where someone takes a whiff of a dead body and says “Smells like almonds… Sherriff, this man was murdered!”
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Cannot stop trying to figure out what was going through his mind when he decided to buy a whole kilogram of cyanide because it was cheaper in bulk.
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“Here, breathe in this cyanide and tell me what it smells like!”
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Yeah, that kinda broke my brain as well. He took what would have been a fairly managable toxic waste hazard, and instead paid three times as much for a much more hazardous responsibility!
I’m sure there is some kind of legitimate industrial use for it, otherwise why would it even be available? But yeah… no… I don’t find that part amusing.
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I can’t find 1kg cyanide in the boing boing store… wth?
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These must have been the Jack Lemmons of GCMS sales, because GCMS can distinguish a lot more smells than some dumb old meat nose, and noses can’t tell you anything about molecular structure, which MS can, though not as much as NMR and electronic spectroscopy.
I guess it’s like when people (still!) say “the world’s most powerful computer is the human brain”. We’re very much in the denial phase of machines being better than us at everything.
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Smells like oranges or lemons?
Perhaps both?
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Well, there’s a debate to be had there regarding the word “sophisticated” in that the olfactory senses are capable of doing far more than simply identifying various molecules and their characteristics. GCMS can only identify what you have programmed it to identify, whereas although a human may not be able to precisely identify a single molecule without training, the inherent ability to detect, catalog and recall molecules represents a level of sophistication no (single) machine has achieved yet. Which was kind of my point about the aggregate vs. the isolate.
As they were salesmen, I am skeptical of everything they say, but the broader point that the human senses are profoundly complex and capable to high degrees of recognition and analysis is valid, hyperbole aside.
Edited for clarity.
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Easier to keep in the gun safe until he finally hires the art brut film recapitulating industrial spycraft of the 1840s, with the robots’ ballistic gel formulated to react visibly with the cyanide bullets. Or, you know, some cyanide loop chemical process he planned on. Still, what to call the staff for the film? Basking grips? Clean-up walkers?
Also, not sure what I think of Dr. Pepper (smells like er, almonds in the absence of 1 kg. cocktails of CNCl) again. Seeing 14:42 in NileRed’s video of bitter almonds’ amygdalin breaking (w. enzymes, says,) into HCN, benzaldehyde, and some sugars is reassuring; it’s not mostly pool chemical smell.
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Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, right? Well…maybe not always.
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I was going to mention the caraway/mint chirality, but then realized it was mentioned in the link. Very weird stuff, especially in how our bodies assign different aromas and flavors to such subtle differences.
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That is some hardcore chemist shit! Respect!
G. N. Lewis… as in Lewis structures, killed himself with cyanide in a lab at Berkeley while his students were at lunch. As a depressed chem grad student there, I thought of doing the same. As a amazing as that place is, it was brutally stressful.
There was a fume hood in my research groups’ lab that had a motion detector that would set off an alarm if the chemist using the hood stopped moving, meant for use with HCN. It was in Latimer Hall. Lewis Hall was next door. Berkeley is that ridiculously chemically famous.
Mind blown.
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Does he even have the gene thou?
Between 20 and 40 percent of the population does not carry the gene needed to detect the odor of cyanide . Even among those who possess the necessary gene , olfactory fatigue can prevent cyanide detection.
Molten cyanide salt was often used used for case hardening steel. I used it once as an apprentice, I don’t recall it smelling of almonds. There was an exractor fan of course that removed most of the fumes however.
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TIL. Thanks!
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But I’ve never heard of anyone saying cyanide smells or tastes like almonds. It has always been bitter almonds.
I suppose the smell of bitter almonds was also more familiar to people in the golden age of crime writing than it is today.
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I don’t even know where one would taste real bitter almonds…or why 
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