Way
back when, Michael Levitt was told by his fellowship advisor that he should
use the new technique of gas chromatography to study farts. When Levitt
asked him why, he replied "Because you’re pretty much of an
incompetent, and this way if you discover anything, at least it’ll
be new, and you’ll be able to publish something."That started Levitt's journey into becoming the world's foremost expert
on flatulence:
Levitt published thirty-four papers on flatus. He identified the three
sulfur gases responsible for flatus odor. He showed that it is mainly
trapped methane gas, not dietary fiber or fat, that makes the floater
float. Most memorably, to this mind anyway, he invented the flatus-trapping
Mylar “pantaloon.” [...]
The great variety of flatus smells — from person to person and
from meal to meal — presented a quandary for the second phase
of the study, the evaluation of various odor-eliminating products. Which
— whose — wind should represent the average American’s?
No one’s, as it turned out. Using mean amounts from chromatograph
readouts as his recipe and commercially synthesized gases as the raw
ingredients, Levitt concocted a lab mixture deemed by the judges “to
have a distinctly objectionable odour resembling that of flatus.”
He reverse-engineered a fart.
Mary Roach of Salon explores the matter in great (and when we say great,
we mean it) details, including things like a pill that deodorizes your
fart from the inside, the theory of fecal self-poisoning, and more:
Here
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