Sometimes, Life Stinks. So He Invented the Nasal Ranger. - The New York Times

For Chuck McGinley, an engineer who devised the go-to instrument for measuring odors, helping people understand what they smell is serious science.

McGinley’s other standard tools, an odor wheel, a chart akin to an artist’s color wheel that he has been fine-tuning for decades, the team described the stink.

Then, as quickly as it had arrived, the smell disappeared.

McGinley said.

McGinley, 76, has returned again and again to society’s stinkiest sites, places very much like this one, in order to measure, describe and demystify smell.

McGinley and his son Mike have established an outsize influence over the measurement and understanding of odor.

McGinley invented, advised governments on odor regulations and empowered communities near smelly places to find a vocabulary for their complaints and a way to measure what their noses are telling them.

“If somebody said, ‘I have an odor problem, where should I go?’ That would be Chuck and Mike McGinley,” said Jacek Koziel, an agricultural engineer who studies odor at Iowa State University.

Their methods provide policymakers and researchers with “hard evidence to make the case that odor is real and it affects people’s lives,” he said.

Of the human senses, smell is perhaps the most elusive yet powerful.

It has even become a diagnostic tool: Losing one’s sense of smell is a possible sign of Covid-19 infection.

McGinley said.

McGinley said?

Nevertheless “it’s very disruptive to people,” said Susan Schiffman, a clinical psychologist who has studied odor and taste for half a century.

Despite having the power to sicken, there are few laws in the United States to regulate odor.

Because it can be experienced so differently by so many people, it puts us in a bind about how we regulate,” said Pamela Dalton, a psychologist who studies odor perception at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.

The decision not to regulate odor at the federal level dates to the 1970s.

In a series of surveys, federal agencies found that half of respondents believed odor was a serious problem.

Today, around a dozen states regulate odor, and various local governments have set up ordinances.

Back in 1996, when Minnesota was deciding whether or not to repeal its odor regulations (it did), Mr.

McGinley said, the problems can disproportionately affect minorities or poorer communities.

“If you are ambitious to found a new science, measure a smell,” he said.

McGinley came to odor by accident.

McGinley said.

But the experience proved fateful a few years later when he interviewed for a job enforcing dust regulations at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

“When I mentioned the scratch-and-sniff, the interviewer said, ‘The odor position pays more,’” he recalled.

“And that’s where I accidentally fell into the business of knowing more than the average person about smell,” he said.

“I realized, with that incident, that odors were more than just smell,” Mr.

McGinley said.

So Mike developed his own mold smell.

Sometimes, when opening a package or walking down the aisle of a grocery store, she said, she’ll note the smell and think back to the odor wheel