Resurrecting a scent
When Christina Agapakis, a Massachusetts-based scientist had the idea to recreate the scent of an extinct flower, she searched through preserved specimens at the Harvard Herbarium for a plant that might work. From many species of extinct plant options, she and her team chose a legume called the Falls-Of-The-Ohio Scurfpea. Taken in the 1840s, the clipping was flattened, brown, and completely devoid of moisture. Nevertheless, they believed there was enough surviving DNA. Through research, international teamwork, and synthetic biology, Agapakis and her team worked towards giving people the chance to smell a flower that no living person had ever smelled.
“There was no digital database at the time, so we started with a Wikipedia list of recently extinct plants, which we searched for in herbariums. It was chance led us to the Scurfpea.”
The preserved clipping was at Harvard thanks to Kentuckian Dr. Charles Wilkins Short. The last time anyone has seen a living Falls-of-the-Ohio Scurfpea was around 1881. As far as anyone knows, the only place in the world it grew was on Rock Island, west of Louisville, on the backside of the Falls of the Ohio. Long before settlement, this was a crossing point for bison and the plant was a common food source for the migrating herds.
In the middle of the 1800s, Dr. Short of Woodford County, was building what was likely the finest private curated collection of dried and pressed plants in America. After studying at Lexington’s Transylvania University and then University of Pennsylvania, Short worked as doctor for about a decade in Lexington and Hopkinsville. He left the field for a teaching position at Transylvania University in 1825. By the time he relocated to teach at the University of Louisville, botany had become his driving passion. In 1848 he retired from teaching and dedicated himself to his enormous garden and his growing personal herbarium.
Several of his cuttings, including the Falls-of-The-Ohio Scurfpea, were sent to major institutions. When Short died in 1863, he had willed his collection to the Smithsonian. Yet at the time, they had no satisfactory way to care for his collection of 15,000 plants. Instead, it was given to the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences.
The Falls-Of-The-Ohio Scurfpea outlived him by a few decades. As civil engineering projects like the canal and dam altered the falls, Rock Island disappeared below the surface. Since it was the only known site to support the Scurfpea, the plant disappeared as well. Though it is believed to be extinct, many Ohio Valley naturalists consider it a rite-of-passage to go in search of the long-lost plant.
In 2019, Agapakis and her team were successful in recreating the scent, once lost to history. At the Cooper Hewitt Museum, a device suspended from the ceiling wafted the recreated scent in an exhibit called Resurrecting the Sublime. The unfamiliar aroma was described by guests as “sweet” and “citrussy,” while Agapakis recalls something more “peppery.”
There had to be some guess work involved. Agapakis called it an echo of the lost scent. Yet the project clearly illustrated the way some aspects of history endure, while others do not. Sights and words often remain, yet sounds and smells are fleeting. Understanding the fragility of life and impact people make, often in the name of progress, is important. However, so is the power of responsible science. Recently, a company called Future Society, inspired by these ideas, used the work done with the scurfpea to create a commercial perfume called Grassland Opera, which is available online and at the Frazier History Museum.
