Putrescine and cadaverine, the two most frighteningly named of all chemicals, lurk in our mouths all day, every day. This simple fact emerged in 2003 when Professor Michael Cooke, of the centre for chemical sciences, Royal Holloway, University of London, and two colleagues published a delectable horror story of a study called Time Profile of Putrescine, Cadaverine, Indole and Skatole in Human Saliva. It appeared in the Archives of Oral Biology. That journal – surprisingly, given its content – is a regular haunt of only a tiny fraction of the world’s horror-fiction enthusiasts.
Cooke and his companions imply that other chemists had grown discouraged at the prospect of doing a time profile of putrescine, cadaverine, indole and skatole in human saliva. The odour of saliva is intensely bland, compared to that of its most appallingly stenched components, and in a certain chemical sense, stable. An American group, they say, “reported their inability to increase the odour of saliva”. But Cooke and his team gave it a go, and succeeded….
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.