How we could achieve dog-level sense of smell – and what it would mean

In the olden days, a “nose job” referred to a cosmetic surgical procedure to improve the shape of someone’s nose. By the mid-21st century, it signified the “super smell” procedure whereby a person’s olfactory sense was augmented and supercharged. In this case, people went from having the standard human number of 6 million olfactory receptors in the nasal cavity, to over 100 million, the average in a canine nose. Human sense of smell became equivalent to that of a dog.

This wasn’t without its challenges.…