Originally published at: Trying to recreate a stink so foul it was considered dangerous to smell | Boing Boing
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Can’t be worse than the scent of a high school locker room.
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[quote=“garethb2, post:1, topic:238674”]Nile was not interested in explaining to the cops what he was up to.
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So he posted this to the internet so they could follow-up with him later. 
In all honesty though, I love his two channels (Red and Blue) as it reminds me of my halcyon days studying organic chemistry at MSU.
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Given how often we’ve seen post-9/11 mass freak-outs over unknown smells, with people panicking, passing out, vomiting and having all sorts of random symptoms unrelated to the substance to which they were exposed, it’s obviously pretty easy to trigger those kinds of responses with even quite mild scents but it’s more about the human brain and social interactions than the smell itself and purely physiological responses to it.
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In my 8th grade science class we made soap using a chemical that the students all called barf-itic acid— I don’t remember what it was really called. When the teacher opened the bottle I could immediately smell it from my seat 20 feet away. I still don’t understand the mechanics of a smell traveling that quickly in still air. The smell permeated the whole school for weeks after that. The teacher was himself surprised by the odor and I think got into a fair amount of trouble over that experiment.
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Obligatory link to Derek Lowe’s “Things I Won’t Work With” article.
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butyric acid.
At my university an unpopular administrator’s office was the target of a butyric acid attack. The whole staircase smelled of it even months later.
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Thank you! That’s a 40 year mystery solved for me. It’s going to be a good year, thanks to you.
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So you’re saying someone made a big stink about it?
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I used to work with Ethanedithiol which was very stinky and made mercaptoethanol smell nice. One of the issue with these sorts of volatile sulfur compounds is that in concentrated form you cant smell it very much but once diluted (in air) they are way more smelly. When I came home from work my housemates could tell I had used Ethanedithiol earlier in the day as my hair and cloths would smell even though I was working in a fume cupboard and wore a lab coat.
For reference I used EDT as a scavenger when cleaving peptides from solid supports. Peptide synthesis uses a bunch of nasty reagents. Probably not as bad as being a chemist that specializes in synthesizing sulfur compounds though.
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Sea Shepherd would lob containers of butyric acid onto the decks of whaling vessels. Stinky, even by whaling vessel standards.
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And it would permanently spoil any meat that they would later attempt to sell.
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This suddenly triggered memories of previous lab jobs. I was the safety officer at a facility and arrived to work one day to the awaiting lab personnel. Someone had dropped a liter bottle of butyric acid in the main lab. It smelled like a movie theater full of patrons who had eaten too much buttered popcorn and parmesan and then all 500 of them had vomited. It was good times cleaning that up.
In grad school, i remember a tour of a mouse breeding facility on a rainy day and that ■■■■■ pheromone smell still lingers.
Another memory was of a researcher who grew a vaginal parasite and he walked through the lab with a sample that filled the room with a smell which was like an orgy had happened in the room. It was a rude smell.
Finally, I had to purify a protein from liters of mouse ascites infection which smelled like a cross between that nasty smell after a sneeze and the pathology bowel directions across the hall…
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“They told us / All they wanted / was a -s-o-u-n-d- smell that could kill someone from a distance”
He mentions the post where I first heard about it. Derek Lowe is funny https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-thioacetone
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I think for a long time in human history, we thought that terrible smells themselves could sicken you - hence the flowers in the plague Drs masks and the miasma plot in “a connecticut yankee in king arthur’s court”.
But I think it was a legit assumption and SO CLOSE to being true. It was always the virus’s and bacteria associated with the stink that was dangerous. But it’s our reptile brain screaming warning when we smell bad stuff.
Although also I think it’s a signal for other animals that are part of the lifecycle that something good is happening for them - they can find corpses, and there is even that weird flower that smells like a rotting corpse.
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