25-09 - Flipbook - Page 135
September
August 2025
sity of Edinburgh at the time but is now at
the University of Manchester.
It turned out that Milne was no timewaster. Kunath, Barran and colleagues
asked Milne to sniff 12 T-shirts, six of which
had recently been worn by Parkinson's
patients, alongside six worn by others
without the disease. She correctly identified the six patients. What's more, she
identified one further person who less
than a year later was diagnosed with
Parkinson's.
"That was kind of amazing," says Barran.
"She pre-diagnosed the condition, just like
she'd done with her husband."
In 2015, news of her astounding ability made headlines around the world.
Milne's story is not as outlandish as you might assume. People's bodies give off a range of
different odours. A new smell may indicate that something has changed, or gone wrong in
the body.
Now, scientists are working on techniques for systematically detecting whiffy biomarkers
that could speed up diagnoses of a dazzling array of conditions ranging from Parkinson's
disease and brain injuries to cancer. The key to spotting them may have been hiding right
under our noses.
"It drives me mad that people are dying and we are putting needles up people's butts in
order to find out if they have prostate cancer, when the signal is already outside and detectable by dogs," says Andreas Mershin, a physicist and co-founder of RealNose.ai, a company that is developing a robotic nose for diagnosing diseases based on scent. Such technology is necessary as relatively few people have noses powerful enough to detect these
tell-tale biochemicals that crop up in the early stages of a disease.
Joy Milne, it turned out, was one of those few. She has hereditary hyperosmia, a trait that
means that her sense of smell is much more sensitive than that of the average human 3 a
kind of super-smeller.
There are some diseases that give off such a strong characteristic whiff that most humans
can smell them. The breath or skin of people with diabetes who are having a hypoglycae-
mic episode, for example, can have a fruity or "rotten apples" aroma to it due to the buildup of fruity-smelling acidic chemicals called ketones in the bloodstream. These are produced when the body metabolises fat instead of glucose.
