New Identification Tech To Track Down People

Expect to see this one on CSI, if not in the hands of real law enforcement: A crime scene investigator walks into an empty flat in Philadelphia or a cave in Pakistan's tribal areas. A gizmo he's carrying beeps or flashes, and - presto! - he's sniffed out the suspect. To fingerprinting, voice recognition, DNA matching and iris scanning, you may soon add a new identification technology: odor typing. Many animals recognize mates and relatives by their unique odor signatures. Insects can detect even faint smells from miles away. "Think of a person or an animal as having an envelope of odors around it that they travel with," says biologist Gary Beauchamp, director of Philadelphia's Monell Chemical Senses Center, a hot spot for odor experts. For their latest research, published 10 days ago in the online journal PLoS One, Beauchamp and colleagues trained mice to respond to the odor of a particular individual's urine. (Mice are big on urine. Humans respond better to sweat, which carries odors in a similar fashion.) Then the scientists tried to confuse the "sensor mice" by feeding the "donor mice" a diet so different that they didn't smell the same. But the mice sniffed through it. The next step is to confirm the finding in humans. Beauchamp thinks that a crude device for identifying people by their unique, genetically determined odor type could be five years away...............

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