Major Proponents and History
The theory was first proposed by Malcolm Dyson in 1937 and expanded by Robert H. Wright in 1954, after which it was largely abandoned in favor of the competing shape theory. A 1996 paper by Luca Turin revived the theory by proposing a mechanism, speculating that the G-protein-coupled receptors discovered by Linda Buck and Richard Axel were actually measuring molecular vibrations using inelastic electron tunneling, rather than responding to molecular keys that work by shape alone. In 2006 a Physical Review Letters paper by Marshall Stoneham and colleagues at University College London and Imperial College London showed that Turin's proposed mechanism was consistent with known physics and coined the expression "swipe card model" to describe it. A PNAS paper in 2011 by Turin, Efthimios Skoulakis, and colleagues at MIT and the Alexander Fleming Biomedical Sciences Research Center reported fly behavioral experiments consistent with a vibrational theory of smell. The theory remains controversial.
Read more about this topic: Vibration Theory Of Olfaction
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