Tracking Terrorists: Hey terrorists, smell ya’ later…

Posted by Jim Stroud

April 26, 2006

Here’s a thought, what if Bin Laden farted? And what if there was technology available to track said fart around the world? Sounds nutty, right? Well… check out this blog post from DefenseTech.

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The Pentagon’s fringe science arm wants to keep track of potential enemies-of-the-state in every way imaginable: not just by sight, or by sound, or by their e-mail; but by their smell, as well.

Darpa’s “Unique Signature Detection Project (formerly known as the Odortype Detection program)” aims to sniff out genetic markers in “human emanations (urine, sweat, etc.)” that “can be used to identify and distinguish specific high-level-of-interest individuals within groups of enemy troops.”

“Recent experimental results” show that chemical compounds in a mouse’s “urinary” scent produces an “odortype” that’s unique to each individual rodent, Darpa observes in its original solicitation for the project. “Although experimental data for humans is far less quantitative,” the agency is hoping that a similarly “genetically determined,” “exploitable chemosignal” can be found in people, too.

Once that marker is found, Darpa’s proposed 2007 budget notes, the agency wants to know what “the impact of non-genetic factors (e.g., diet, stress, health, age) [have] on the signal.” That could help figure out how to “robustly extract” the signal “from a complex and varied chemical background.”

The sniffing-out process has already begun in the lab, one professor told Business Week last year. A person’s smell “is a cocktail of hundreds of molecules… The question is whether it’s a gin and tonic or a margarita.” Making those distinictions out in the odorifically-complex real world won’t be easy, he added.

Click here for the rest of the story.