El Bulli chef and culinary genius Ferran Adria stopped by the lab last week – he wanted to see a bit of science, and was in town for the Harvard Science and Cooking lecture series, and so arranged visits to a handful of HMS labs.  Adria and Bob chatted for a bit about olfactory and taste perception – he was particularly taken with the relatively recent findings from Leslie Vosshall and Hiro Matsunami demonstrating that olfactory receptor polymorphisms underlie different perceptual responses to androstenone. After mulling it over a bit, he decided that our lab needed a new motto — “no hay alimentos raros, sólo la gente raro” which translates roughly into “there are no strange foods, only strange people.” We agree!


Afterwards, Tari Tan and Stan Pashkovski did a great job recapitulating the parts of the seminal Lin and Katz experiment that showed that the functional representation for the odor of whole cloves contains within it the component functional responses to the individual odors found within clove headspace. Adria seemed to get a kick out of it – all in all, potentially the coolest day in lab ever!

Blurry pic of Ferran Adria in the scope room with Tari and Bob during the functional imaging experiment.

Bob and Ferran Adria in the lab.