To mark its centennial, Firmenich held an unusual celebration -- a leading-edge scientific symposium in Geneva, Switzerland on September 3-5, 1995. Such an event is not unusual for Firmenich, a technologydriven company that has developed leading-edge science and technology and translated it into business success.
This book, a collection of the papers presented at the symposium, speaks not just to current knowledge. It also offers interesting insights into the future. In so doing, it follows its predecessor volume celebrating Firmenichs 75th anniversary This earlier volume -- Olfaction and Gustation, edited by G. Ohloff and A. F. Thomas, and publisbed hy Academic Press in 1971—was prescient in identifying concepts that have become part of today’s leading edge; concepts such as membrane receptors and transduction through ’’second messenger” cAMP. These ideas were introduced to the chemical senses at the 1970 symposium.
The 1995 gathering of international leaders in olfactory and taste research enabled a remarkably wide range of disciplines and approaches to be covered in only twelve papers. These express better than any marketing copy the breadth of interest of the sponsoring company. Although the formal presentations were limited to these twelve, the invited guests comprised a veritable “who’s who” in the international science and technology community of taste, smell, flavor and fragrance. For that reason, it is regrettable that the interesting informal discussions were not included in the book.
