What do you get when you combine a team of scientists, a lab specializing in sequencing DNA and some extinct species? While the answer could be the plot of “Jurassic Park,” these are actually the foundations of Future Society, a biotech fragrance company that has changed the landscape of scent by conjuring extinct flowers.
Working with the Harvard University Herbaria — home to over five million botanical specimens — and biotech firm Ginkgo Bioworks, Future Society has successfully sequenced the DNA of preserved plants, some of which date back more than 150 years. Six of them have already been made into perfumes, with signature notes ranging from woody to floral.
Take the orbexilum stipulatum, a herbaceous, flowering plant that grew on Rock Island in the shallowest part of the old Falls of the Ohio and is last known to have flowered in 1881. The plant is thought to have been wiped out after the eradication of buffalo that used to migrate through the area, meaning its seeds were no longer dispersed far and wide. Then in the 1920s, the entire area was flooded by dams, submerging all hope for it.
“We set out to make scents we’ve never smelled before and fragrances that were previously not possible to make,” said Jasmina Aganovic, founder and CEO of Future Society and its parent company Arcaea, in a video interview with CNN.
“It’s similar (to the) technology that was used on ancestry.com and 23andme whereby users spit into a tube, send it away and wait to find out about their genetics,” Aganovic explained. “We used this technology on preserved plant specimens from extinct flowers, searching for scent molecules which started to provide a glimpse into what these extinct flowers might have smelled like.”
Not an exact science
Aganovic didn’t set out with a grand plan for a certain flower she was desperate to smell, but wanted to demonstrate how new biological advancements could be used in the beauty sector.
In a “not very romantic” fashion, the Future Society team looked at how many specimens existed in the Harvard University Herbaria, how many samples they could get and which of those would be reconstructible, because DNA degrades over time, she said. “Ultimately we didn’t know if this de-extincting exercise was going to work, so it was a numbers game to try it out.”
On the process, Aganovic explained: “The actual specimens are small little snippets brought back to the lab and they undergo a series of chemical reactions to degrade them and ensure that all that’s left is the DNA.”
Part of the data that first emerged was very raw, Aganovic said. “It smelled like something went through a lawnmower, because you’re getting everything — not just the fragrant petals, you’re getting the plant’s stem, the leaves, who knows what… You don’t just get the genetics for the flower in the petal, right? It’s all of the genetics.”
In other words, recreating an extinct bloom’s scent is not, Aganovic points out, an exact science. Not least because scent is highly complex; for example, a jasmine flower or a rose is composed of hundreds — if not thousands — of different scent molecules and chemical compounds.
“We can draw an analogy to our own genetics,” explained Aganovic. “We carry two copies of genes, one from our biological father, one from our biological mother, but even though our body carries those genes, it doesn’t express both. What the body chooses to express is exactly the nuance here.” When the extinct plant DNA was sequenced, many different genes for the scent molecules were exposed — but not all “turned on” when they were put into yeast, a living organism, she said. “That narrowed down the olfactory profile and gave more confidence around the direction that the physical flower went in.”
Technology with a human touch
While Aganovic and her team were left with this genetic evidence, there was still work to do to interpret it. “Having the DNA in yeast doesn’t brew this beautiful, fine fragrance, it just gives us the scent profile. The actual blending and composition relies on perfumers’ existing notes and compounds from their own libraries,” Aganovic explained.
Future Society does not use the DNA to regrow the extinct blooms. There are also scant — and subjective — records available. If no one living has experienced the flower first-hand, how does Future Society determine which flowers warrant a fragrance?
“This is what I really love about this work,” said Aganovic, who is a scientist by training but has been working in the beauty industry since 2014. “It wasn’t just down to the arrogance of science. While we had the data, we actually relied on different areas of expertise including perfumers and their knowledge of aroma chemicals and botany to look at the lineage of these plants, what living plants they were related to, where they were growing and what their environment was like… These elements all gave hints to how we might reconstruct the smell through a mixture of art and science.”
Indeed, Future Society worked with perfumers from famed scent houses Givaudan (which Arcaea also counts as an investor, alongside Chanel and Olaplex) and Robertet to source a mixture of fragrance notes — synthetic, natural, and bioengineered — inspired by the scent molecules of the extinct flowers to create the blends. The resulting scents are, according to the brand’s website, “tributes to” what the plants could have smelled like.
