# "I can smell your pheromones at 3 parts per million" -- Leto Atreides II **URL:** \ **Category:** Pheromone Theory & Molecules\ **Created:** [April 4, 2014, 10:49am UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/i-can-smell-your-pheromones-at-3-parts-per-million-leto-atreides-ii/61618 "2014-04-04T10:49:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Brian\_F](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/pheromonetalk.com/brian_f/32/1573_2.png) [@Brian\_F](https://pheromonetalk.com/u/Brian_F)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2014, 10:49am UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/i-can-smell-your-pheromones-at-3-parts-per-million-leto-atreides-ii/61618/1 "2014-04-04T10:49:47Z")
Had a funny thought today while flipping through my notes. Here is a quote taken out of context from Leon Atreides II in Dune (4th book): "I am the most ardent people-watcher who ever lived. I watch them inside me and outside. Past and present can mingle with odd impositions in me. And as the metamorphosis continues in my flesh wonderful things happen to my senses. It’s as though I sensed everything close-up. I have extremely acute hearing and vision, plus a sense of smell extraordinarily discriminating. **I can detect and identify [pheromones](https://pheromonelabs.com/) at three parts per million. I know. I have tested it. You cannot hide very much from my senses. I think it would horrify you what I can detect by smell alone. Your pheromones tell me what you are doing or are prepared to do.** And gesture and posture! I stared for half a day once at an old man sitting on a bench in Arrakeen. He was a fifth-generation descendant of Stilgar the Naib and did not even know it. " **Source** : Taken out of context from: Herbert, Frank, “The Stolen Journals”, God Emperor of Dune (1981) So I patched this on to a snippet on odor detection threshold of yucky stuff. Why? Ah, to loosely fit the theme of “fear”. Fear smells yucky. [http://i61.tinypic.com/2czvc7l.png](http://i61.tinypic.com/2czvc7l.png) While the odorant, “Leto Atreides II’s Subject’s Pheromone Output” is obviously tongue in cheek, I used creative license for the proposed odorant formula. I chose 2-heptanol (C7 H14 O), which is purported to be a rodent alarm pheromone (Guitierrez-Garcia, et al, 2006) and gives blue cheese its characteristic smell. And by this chart, our fictional hero’s sense of pheromonal tracking isn’t nearly as good as the typical human’s sense of, say, olympic sized pool detection. (Chlorine’s recognition threshold is .314 ppm) At the time of this writing, science literature (as far as I have dug) hasn’t agreed on any human alarm pheromones. They exist, sure: I recently read a thread compiled by 15 San Quentin inmates discussing what a prison _smells_ like. I can only imagine “fear” is a spice in that soup. Have the "fear"omones been measured and quantified? Not yet… Back to this snippet. **You cannot hide very much from my senses. I think it would horrify you what I can detect by smell alone. Your pheromones tell me what you are doing or are prepared to do.** … do you agree with this statement? Do you have any experiences that relate? ---
**Author:** ![Miss\_Dragon](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/pheromonetalk.com/miss_dragon/32/866_2.png) [@Miss\_Dragon](https://pheromonetalk.com/u/Miss_Dragon)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2014, 6:15pm UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/i-can-smell-your-pheromones-at-3-parts-per-million-leto-atreides-ii/61618/2 "2014-04-04T18:15:20Z")
That’s hilarious! It’s like he’s saying, “i can smell you if you reek really badly!” One more reason that I love sci-fi assumptions before science quite catches up. Like old movies of people in space before we’d actually achieved space travel.