How to Train a Dog to Smell Cancer

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The dog of Claire was trained on bladder cancer and yet this has a breast cancer. When you train them on one cancer they realize, oh this also smells cancer-y. And we have no idea how the dogs can do this. We just know that they can. So if Andreas could build something that recognizes a song, not the individual notes themselves, he wouldn't need to figure out exactly how all those parts come together to form a smell. As long as he could train it like a dog, it could work.

Believe it or not, scientists still don't know how the sense of smell works. But they're looking at how powerful it is - dogs can actually sniff out cancer and many other diseases - and they're trying to figure out how to reverse engineer it. In fact, one MIT scientist may have built a robot nose ... without completely understanding how his invention works.

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