In the pursuit of Art

Watching 9 Songs, Michael Winterbottom's art-house romance, is an uncomfortable experience.

For those of you unfamiliar with the premise, 9 Songs charts a short lived relationship between Matt, a British glaciologist, and Lisa, an American visitor to London who will eventually leave him to return home. Retrospectively narrated from his tent pitched on the Antarctic ice shelf, Matt juxtaposes the loneliness of his current environment with the intimacies of the previous winter.

Its a solid concept; one could fully imagine oneself forensically examining failed relationships when surrounded by such desolation. But rather than explore the emotional connection between the lovers, Winterbottom chose to represent their intimacy almost exclusively in, well, the most intimate way possible. Consequently we, the audience, are treated to around 30 minutes of two young actors engaging in extremely graphic, unsimulated sex with someone they have no personal relationship with.

In interviews both actors have stressed that they did not make the film for money or exposure, and given their hostile reaction to the inevitable media furore I have no reason to doubt them, but what does motivate a real (as opposed to pornographic) actor to accept such a role? Usually, we are told, such films are made in the pursuit of artistic expression and/or a noble attempt to represent reality. Margo Stilley, the actress who plays Lisa, concurs:

I wanted to make a film about something I really believe in, which is to show sex in a very positive light, as a very important piece of everyday life and a very important piece of a relationship, whether it's successful or unsuccessful.

But the artist here is clearly Winterbottom, yet it isn't him having sexual intercourse captured on film stock for eternity. Stilley again:

Michael had this way of puppeteering us around, [he] did convey a lot. He was specific.

For Stilley in particular, aged just twenty one and on her first professional acting gig, one can't help but feel uncomfortable in the role of voyeur. In interviews she remains bullish about her decision to accept the role, but her request to have her real name removed from publicity materials perhaps tells a different story. Moreover, I can't help feeling that Winterbottom's claim that he planned to cast her again in his next film project - something that does not appear to have materialized - betrays a guilty conscience. I wonder whether Stilley would have accepted the role had she consulted with Maria Schneider beforehand?

Incidentally, the nine songs of the title frame the sexual exploits of the couple, as they venture out of the bedroom to see live bands play. Its an odd conceit, and one that was developed during filming rather than a pre-scripted plot element. The bands are great, especially Michael Nyman.

If nothing else, 9 Songs could be considered a bad porn movie with a great soundtrack. Not exactly a strong selling point, I admit.

From Infection to Olfaction

Two recent high profile publications, in Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveal yet another fascinating facet of olfaction.

Many of us who own pets will know that animals appear to have a canny ability to know when we are sick. Stories abound about dogs or cats that can smell cancerous tumors or other illnesses (I seem to remember Gregory House (above) citing this phenomenon when faced with the logical alternative, a feline harbinger of death!) Wild animals will often avoid sick members of their own species, a strategy that has obvious evolutionary advantages in the face of infectious agents or predators seeking an easy meal.

But how does this work? You might suppose that animals are responding to a behavioral change in the sick individual. You feel sick, therefore you behave differently, therefore your pet pooch behaves differently. But what if the animal could actually smell sickness? And if it could, how does it know what sickness smells like? Two research groups have now provided a potential molecular mechanism for how animals could detect infections using their sense of smell.

The labs of Ivan Rodriguez and, independently, Linda Buck identified a new class of olfactory receptor in the laboratory mouse. This is the fifth class of receptor known to be involved in mediating olfaction, but what sets it apart from the others is the unique nature of its ligands (the molecules the receptors bind). The ligands are formylated peptides: small proteins that have an aldehyde group attached to the first amino acid.

So far so interesting, but how does detecting these peptides indicate sickness? Well formylated peptides are relatively rare in nature, but they are produced by bacteria which, of course, are often a source of pathogenic illness. Therefore, in theory at least, mice should be able to smell the presence of specific types bacteria using these receptors.

Intriguingly the receptors are found in the part of the nose that detects pheromones - which are chemical signals that are exchanged between animals or social purposes. This suggests that the new receptors are involved in regulating a fundamental behavior, rather than simply detecting an odor, and implies that detection would result in some kind of instinctive behavioral response (i.e. avoidance).

But I am getting ahead of myself slightly, because these publications simply describe the receptors and show that they can detect peptides when presented in a purified manner. It remains to be seen if the mice detect bacterial peptides from other mice in a more natural context, and whether this results in a stereotyped behavioral response. Its also unclear the extent to which the same system is functional in other mammals; it does not appear to be present in humans, for example. Nevertheless, I find it remarkable that - even in this post-genomic era - there are still entire sensory sub-systems that we know nothing about.

I was at a meeting recently where Linda Buck (the lead scientist on one of these papers and someone with quite the record in this field: she shared the 2004 Nobel Prize for discovering the first olfactory receptors) was asked if this was the last class of olfactory receptors to be described. She thought it was likely, but either way, these reports show that we have much still to learn about scents and sensibility. I hope, in this blog, to chart some of the more interesting aspects of that journey.