Speculations on Smell
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
This paper complements the detailed account of our experiments that will have appeared in Journal of Physiology by the time this volume is published (Gesteland, Lettvin, and Pitts, 1965). It presents a cloud of opinion, prejudice, and hunch that we try not to show when offering data for, our concrete results, however hard won, have not led us to any epistemological epiphany. Neither have they given us a molecular machine. When we had found that the responses of single nerve fibers in NI were not simply related to the stimuli presented, we had two choices. First, we could have sought by other, yet uninvented methods, those more elementary events whose combinations yielded the functions we saw—i.e., we could have concentrated on the molecular basis for chemical transduction. Second, we could have accepted the combinational responses as given, and then made inductions on the nature of the olfactive code. Walter...
