Question: Hi Darren Logan I am going to ask you 2 quistions; 1. why is the scent of poo, so of puttting? 2. If you had to do an experiment on a famous person - who would it be and why? please answer - ThankYou x

Darren Logan answered on 19 Mar 2012:

1. This is a good question, and we don’t actually know the full answer to it yet. Poo probably smells bad to use because we have evolved a mechanism to avoid it (so we don’t catch diseases from it). The interesting question is how does that work. Is it instictive, so that we are naturally programmed by our genes to avoid the smell from birth, or is it something we learn when we are little? Babies don’t seem to mind the smell as much as we do, so its possible that it is just something we develop over time. Its something I’d quite like to study, but its difficult to convince people in my lab to work with poo!

2. Ooooh. I guess I would have to say Jesus. I would take some of his DNA and sequence it. Since we get one copy of our genes from our mother and one from our father, I would very quickly be able to tell who his parents were and also be able to tell who today is most closely related to him. That would be pretty interesting, don’t you think?