Outliers: Up to your ears in personal information

Some scientists say it's time to wake up and smell the earwax. Seems a new study from the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a Philadelphia-based institute dedicated to taste and smell research, says earwax is a “neglected body secretion” with great potential as a source of personal information.

To explore the characteristic smells of earwax, researchers compared Caucasian men with those of East Asian descent, by gently heating their earwax to discern how many airborne molecules, or volatile organic compounds, were released. Caucasian men consistently released greater amounts of certain odorous compounds.

“In essence, we could obtain information about a person's ethnicity simply by looking in his ears,” said Monell chemist Katharine Prokop-Prigge. Scientists say these odor-producing chemical compounds may also be able to indicate what individuals have eaten and where they've traveled, and may act as a first indication of certain metabolic diseases.

Scientifically known as cerumen, scientists say earwax is a mixture of secretions from specialized sweat glands mixed with fatty acids that are excreted from the sebaceous glands. It was actually underarm odor that led Monell scientists to investigate earwax in the first place. It turns out both substances are related to a small change in a gene known as ABCC11. Previous research showed underarm odor could convey everything from a person's personal identity and gender to sexual orientation and health status.

The next step is hopefully to go beyond simply identifying someone based on odor, and use the compounds to detect disease, Prokop-Prigge said.

Outliers is all ears for the next development.

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