Dr George Dodd: "We can capture the smell"

He has teamed up with artist Clara Ursitti to create an exhibition of 'smell portraits', each one an olfactory description of an individual.

The project is part of the Sci-Art Initiative run by the medical research charity the Wellcome Trust.

It has been made possible by the development of sophisticated new odour analysis equipment to capture and analyse scent. It requires the subject of the portrait to wear a small badge of special material close to their body.

The badge captures odours which, when sent back to the lab, can be scrutinised to reveal their precise chemical signatures.

Intriguing pictures

But do not expect just a smelly picture - or even the image of an individual's head and shoulders.

"It's very intriguing to see," said Dr George Dodd. "When people come into the room in the gallery, there are buttons and things on the wall to get a smell and they don't quite know how to behave.

"They're not looking at paintings, they're not looking at anything concrete, and they're experiencing a very pure smell sensation.

"But when they get used to it, it becomes extraordinary interesting. For instance, with a little practice they can distinguish males from females."

Wellcome's initiative is now an annual event that aims to fuse the creativity that exists in the minds of both scientists and artists. The charity has given £80,000 to six projects.

Perhaps the most striking result from all this collaboration comes in the shape of a sumptuous gown on which thousands of contraceptive pills are displayed in individual packets.

The pills - all 6,550 of them to be precise - are supposed to represent 26 years of contraceptive protection.

Real applications

But before you get the impression that this is all just a bit of a laugh, Dr Dodd insists there is some serious science going on here as well.

The same technology that allows his artistic partner to create the scented portraits has real practical implications.

For example, asthma sufferers and patients with liver disease are known to have certain vapours in their breath. Because Dr Dodd's equipment is so sensitive, he thinks it can be developed into a useful diagnostic tool.

"The reason our [smell] technology exists is that we now have a company in which we are diagnosing diseases by measuring slight changes in body aroma which we get from breath.

"It's a very simple for a patient to blow into a tube - to blow into an electronic device - and we think we will be able to measure lots of important diseases that way."