Uc Science Today

We can lose our sense of smell because of a disease, injury, or simply - aging, but doctors don’t pay a lot of attention to this problem, according to neuroscientist John Ngai at the University of California, Berkeley. “Most people that write to me or call me, and say I've lost a sense of smell and I would ask them, what does your doctor say? And the doctor says no big deal don't worry about it, right? In fact, there aren't even any good, widely-used standardized tests for smell.” That’s because scientists still don’t really know how to repair the olfactory cells responsible for the sense of smell. But Ngai hopes his new research on stem cells could help find answers. “Now the challenge is to really start digging in to see, can we actually alter what these cells do. We've identified some pathways and manipulated them genetically, and shown that this can affect how the stem cell behaves in terms of, do I make a neuron? Do I not make a neuron? And then the question is, if I actually do, for example, increa