Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Time
magazine ran a piece about the demise of working dogs one week before Joan
Andreasen-Webb told me that Vita was pregnant with Solo. Before Solo was more than a
clump of rapidly reproducing canine cells, he and his nose were passé.
“Memo to man's best friend,”
Time
told magazine-reading dogs in January 2004. “In a
few years, you may be relieved of your police drug-sniffing duties, thanks to a pair of Ge-
orgia Tech scientists.” Scientists “have developed a handheld electronic nose that detects the
presence of cocaine and other narcotics better than your cold, wet snout ever could.” The
magazine overestimated dogs' print literacy while not giving them nearly enough credit for
nose literacy.
This biotech moment wasn't the first time I'd felt like an apprentice on the cusp of entering
into a brilliant new career just as pink slips were getting handed out. My career timing had al-
ways been lousy. In 1982, the same year I started my first newspaper job in the foggy San Joa-
quin Valley, Gannett launched
USA Today
in full color, with its nuggets of fun-to-consume
news. Publisher Allen H. Neuharth called the style of reporting and writing the “journalism
of hope.” Headlines emphasized the positive. When a charter plane crashed in Málaga, Spain,
the headline read:
MIRACLE: 327 SURVIVE, 55 DIE
. But newspapers were already ailing, victims
of executive bean counters, their own stockholders, and, soon, the burgeoning Internet.
Thinking quickly, I transitioned from newspapers about a decade before massive layoffs
began. This time I trained in an industry I knew would last. Higher education had been
around since medieval times. Knowledge would never go out of fashion. I became a tenured
university professor about a decade before tenure started dying and the sun started setting on
affordable public universities.
Now the working-dog nose was in decline as well. Scientists, engineers, and chemists, with
the media as their cheerleaders, were informing me that my new avocation was well on its
way to obsolescence. Dog substitutes—biomimetic replacements—weren't just hot; they were
blowing dogs out of the scent pool entirely. Once again, I had arrived at the tail end of an
era.
Researchers know—thanks to the public relations officers attached to their start-ups and
universities—that they need to market their fake noses using familiar and fuzzy terms. The
fake noses might not be surrounded by furry muzzles, but the image needs to be there: FIDO,
RealNose, the E-Dog. Sometimes names backfire. Dog-on-a-chip was not a good choice.
All of these artificial noses—whether for bomb detection, drug detection, land-mine de-
tection, or human-decomposition detection—have several things in common, according to
the media and the grant applications. They won't shed and won't bite. They won't get tired or
overheated. They will detect parts per trillion of anything. They will put sniffer dogs out of
business. Any day now.
