A series of unfortunate events reveals something off about molecular biologist Maryam Zaringhalam’s sense of smell.

Maryam Zaringhalam is a molecular biologist who just received her PhD from The Rockefeller University. In the lab, Maryam tinkers with parasites and computers to understand how small changes to our genetic building blocks can affect how we look and function. When she's not doing science, Maryam runs ArtLab, a series that pairs scientists with artists, and podcasts with Science Soapbox, exploring science and policy. You can follow her science-ish musings on Twitter @webmz_

This story originally aired on Jan. 27, 2017.

Story Transcript

The bathroom has always been a sacred place for me. When I was seven, I used to retreat into the bathroom to escape all of the day-to-day bullshit that came with being a seven-year-old. I would wrangle up my stuffed animals, and I’d line them up on the tiles, and I would assume my porcelain throne. I would teach them about math and I would read stories to them.

But our time together would inevitably get cut short when my brother -- stupid brother -- would come pounding on the door, begging to use the bathroom. So having a bathroom of my own became this status symbol for me, this thing to aspire to. All of my role models on TV -- like Sabrina, the Teenage Witch or the Olsen twins -- have their own bathrooms. So why couldn’t I?

I had one of those beds growing up that was lofted so you could put another bed underneath and turn it into a bunk bed, except I didn’t do that. I would use my lofted bed to construct the most elaborate, magnificent forts you’d ever seen. Nobody had ever told me that a fort couldn’t have a bathroom in it. Being the crafty, resourceful seven-year-old that I was, I saw an opportunity in that my brother was fresh off of getting potty trained. There was this plastic commode up for the taking, so I snatched it and I stashed it under my bed. Along with a bucket of water and some soap, because hygiene comes first.

There, in the solitude of my bathroom fort, I relieved myself quietly for a week. Now, of course, after use, I would run to the real bathroom under cover of darkness and I would empty out the contents, because I’m not an animal. But this didn’t stop the remnants of what I had done from accumulating this smell that eventually wafted out of the fort, into my bedroom, and out into the hall, where, at the end of the week, my babysitter followed her nose and discovered my dirty little secret.

Luckily for me, she was one of those cool babysitters, the kind that really values the relationship and trust that she’s built with a seven-year-old. And so she choked back horror, disgust, some light barfing, was just like, “Maryam, if you promise never to do this again, I promise that your parents don’t need to know about it.” I didn’t really understand what the big deal was and so I was like, “You know what? I’ll set my dreams aside and sure, that’s fine.” So this remained a secret between the two of us for over a decade.

Cut to Maryam goes to college. I moved to New York City and became a biology major, which meant that I had to take organic chemistry classes, which meant that I had to take a lab. When you’re in the lab, you’re working with all of these chemicals that aren’t so great for you. This one day, we’re working with a chemical called phenol. Today, I use phenol all the time to extract DNA and RNA because I’m a molecular biologist. That day, I don’t really remember what we were doing with it, except that I do remember that we had to seriously gear up, like lab coats on, safety goggles on, gloves on. We got to work in these cool fume hoods, like real scientists.

I’m working with this phenol for an hour, two hours, and I start to feel lightheaded, and dizzy, and nauseous, like I’m going to die. So I call over my TA and I’m just like, “Hey, do you think that I could be excused because I’m not feeling so great.” She comes over and stops dead in her tracks and is like, “Holy shit! You are baking in phenol fumes.” She realizes that my fume hood is broken and that the alarm has been silenced – and that I have essentially been poisoning myself for the better part of two hours. Because what I didn’t mention is that phenol is super dangerous, if you get even a drop of it on your skin, it burns you instantly.

She rushes me out of the lab and out onto the street so I can breathe in some fresh air and get the toxicity out of my system. As I slowly start coming to -- I’m walking a little straighter, I’m standing a little taller, feeling less on the brink of death -- she turns and asks me, “So do you have a cold or something?” I was like, “No, do I look sick -- aside from being lightly poisoned?” She was just like, “No, but I’m just trying to figure out how you didn’t smell that.” Because phenol gives off these fumes that smell really bad.

A friend once described it to me as smelling painful, like if you put a lemon meringue pie in the oven alongside a Barbie doll and you baked them together. That’s what it smells like, apparently. The reason it smells so bad is, again, because it’s dangerous and it’s our body’s way of recognizing, “Stop, there’s danger ahead, don’t go any closer.” Except that I couldn’t smell that phenol smell.

I started thinking, for the first time in my life, can I smell anything at all? Is that even possible? I flash back to my seven-year-old self and I recall the look of horror and disgust on my babysitter’s face, and I realize, “Oh my God, that pot of piss and poo rems probably smelled really freaking terrible.” Being the resourceful scientist millennial that I am, I got to Googling and I typed in, Can’t smell, what’s wrong? One of the first things to pop up was an entry titled anosmia, which is the inability to smell.

The first thing that I thought was, “Well, that’s silly. It sounds like ‘no nosmia,’ and I definitely have this huge Persian honker in between my eyes.” Every time I go home, my grandma’s like, “Hi, when are we getting plastic surgery, Maryam?” To which I respond, “Never, Grandma, but thanks for asking for the billionth time. Super nice.” This was the first time that I had heard this word anosmia to describe a condition that I didn’t even know that I had, that I didn’t even know was possible to have.

I realized that smelling is actually this really easy behavior to copy, when you think about it. I would see my mom get a bouquet of flowers, because my dad’s real sweet like that, and she’d put her face in the bouquet and she’d inhale and say, “Smells so good.” And so I would do the same. My brother would encounter a sweaty gym sock and would recoil in horror being like, “Ew, gross, get that away from me.” And so I would do the same. I had been pretending my whole life that I could do this thing, that I understood what this thing smell was, when I was pretending all along.

I felt kind of like a liar, but a liar that doesn’t lie about cool things like a spy, a liar that lies about really stupid things like, “Oh yeah, I know what that smells like, sure.” Stupid. Because I am really the first anosmic person that I’ve ever met, the first anosmic person that my lab TA had ever met, that my babysitter had ever met -- heck, that my mom and dad have ever met. And so I’m travelling down this Google rabbit hole as one does and I learn that some people lose their sense of smell from head trauma. So I called my mom and dad and I’m just like, “Hey, do you guys ever remember dropping me on my head?” and they’re like, “Not that I recall.” So I checked that off the list. I learned that some people lose their sense of smell from snorting too much coke, except that as a seven-year-old I just wasn’t that curious about the thing.

I’m reading and I’ m reading and I learn that I am actually one in roughly about 10,000 people that is born without a sense of smell. Typically these people are men, and typically those men have smaller balls, for whatever reason. That threw up this gender identity crisis where I was like, “Wait, what if my balls are so tiny that I didn’t even realize that I’m a man.” I’m a woman -- it’s fine.

The truth is that scientists don’t really know much about why I am the way that I am, why people are born anosmic. Except that, at some point during my development when I was in my mom’s stomach, the part of my brain responsible for smelling just didn’t develop right. So actually, whenever I meet a neuroscientist who studies smell, my ice-breaker fun fact is, “Oh, I’m Maryam and I’m anosmic.” To which they ask immediately, “Oh my gosh, have you given your samples to science?” And I reply, real cool and casual, “Sure have, first week of grad school. I smelled stuff, or tried to, for three hours and then gave them my blood, lots of it, and they still couldn’t figure out what’s wrong with me.”

I wish I could tell you that something really transformative happened when I learned that I was anosmic. The truth is not much because I’ve lived this way my whole life, as long as I can remember. Except that I now I don't pretend that I understand what perfume’s all about. In fact I stay away from it completely because I’m terrified I’ll pick the wrong one and become labeled “Pungent Maryam.”

Occasionally I panic that I’m going to die alone because I can’t smell pheromones, except that my neuroscientist friend told me that pheromone receptors are broken in all of us, and so I’m no more likely to die along than you or you or you, except that I might end up dating a really hot, smelly man who just reeks of fitness. And tonight I might ride home on one those mysteriously empty subway cars, and I’ll sit down next to the man who’s been quietly barfing into his jacket for who knows how long. I’ll sprawl out in all of my space, blissfully unaware of the reek. I’ll go home and I’ll wash my face and brush my teeth and have a nighttime pee in the bathroom that is not under my bed but that I’ve learned to share with my two friends.