“The exciting thing about science is that you don’t know the answer,” says Monell Center (www.monell.org) director Gary Beauchamp, discussing the organization’s chemosensory research. “There’s a wonderful collaborative aspect here where [our corporate sponsors] are interested in fundamental questions for reasons that are not yet apparent … We don’t do product research. We don’t study anybody’s products. We don’t develop products. Part of my job is to find the overlap between corporate interests in a practical [sense] and the scientific interests on [Monell’s] side. Their product is product; our product is publications in scientific journals.” Monell’s leading-edge research focuses on everything from the mechanisms of taste and smell to the role of chemical senses in human communication, health and nutrition.
