Last summer sales of Schering-Plough's only other big seller, the hepatitis drug Peg-Intron, nose-dived as doctors switched to a new and more convenient compound from Roche Holding.
Columbia University's Richard Axel, whose work on mapping the genes and receptors of our sense of smell garnered the 2004 Nobel prize for physiology, said the kinds of experiments revealed this week would not resolve the debate - only a microscopic look at the receptors in the nose would finally show what is at work.