She first noticed the scent on her husband. Now her abilities are helping unlock new research in early disease detection.
By Scott Sayare in the NYT: Scott Sayare is a writer in New York. He interviewed doctors, researchers, caregivers and patients over several months for this article.
As a boy, Les Milne carried an air of triumph about him, and an air of sorrow. Les was a particularly promising and energetic young man, an all-Scottish swim champion, head boy at his academy in Dundee, a top student bound for medical school. But when he was young, his father died; his mother was institutionalized with a diagnosis of manic depression, and he and his younger brother were effectively left to fend for themselves. His high school girlfriend, Joy, was drawn to him as much by his sadness as his talents, by his yearning for her care. “We were very, very much in love,” Joy, now a flaxen-haired 72-year-old grandmother, told me recently. In a somewhat less conventional way, she also adored the way Les smelled, and this aroma of salt and musk, accented with a suggestion of leather from the carbolic soap he used at the pool, formed for her a lasting sense of who he was. “It was just him,” Joy said, a steadfast marker of his identity, no less distinctive than his face, his voice, his particular quality of mind.
Joy’s had always been an unusually sensitive nose, the inheritance, she believes, of her maternal line. Her grandmother was a “hyperosmic,” and she encouraged Joy, as a child, to make the most of her abilities, quizzing her on different varieties of rose, teaching her to distinguish the scent of the petals from the scent of the leaves from the scent of the pistils and stamens. Still, her grandmother did not think odor of any kind to be a polite topic of conversation, and however rich and enjoyable and dense with information the olfactory world might be, she urged her granddaughter to keep her experience of it to herself. Les only learned of Joy’s peculiar nose well after their relationship began, on a trip to the Scandinavian far north. Joy would not stop going on about the creamy odor of the tundra, or what she insisted was the aroma of the cold itself.
Joy planned to go off to university in Paris or Rome. Faced with the prospect of tending to his mother alone, however, Les begged her to stay in Scotland. He trained as a doctor, she as a nurse; they married during his residency. He was soon the sort of capable young physician one might hope to meet, a practitioner of uncommon enthusiasm, and shortly after his 30th birthday, he was appointed consultant anesthesiologist at Macclesfield District General Hospital, outside Manchester, in England, the first in his graduating class to make consultant.
The Milnes installed themselves in an ancient stone farmhouse high on a country hill in Cheshire. By then they had three young sons, and the edifice, which was old enough to be listed in the Domesday Book of 1086, was a happy, never-ending project. They threw elaborate, boozy dinner parties; they kept geese and hens and took in stray cats, dogs, a duck. “We just seemed to get on and do things,” Joy told me. Friends still liken her to Mary Poppins, part twinkly magic, part no frills practicality. She considers herself to be a “never-stop person,” she said. Her husband was the same.
Les spent long hours in the surgical theater, which in Macclesfield had little in the way of ventilation, and Joy typically found that he came home smelling of anesthetics, antiseptics and blood. But he returned one August evening in 1982, shortly after his 32nd birthday, smelling of something new and distinctly unsavory, of some thick must. From then on, the odor never ceased, though neither Les nor almost anyone but his wife could detect it. For Joy, even a small shift in her husband’s aroma might have been cause for distress, but his scent now seemed to have changed fundamentally, as if replaced by that of someone else. She thought he smelled vaguely of his mother. (continued)
Frank was a skilled community organizer when he was first elected to the House in 1994. In that election, Democrats suffered a catastrophic defeat, losing 29 seats and going from a 65-33 majority to a 62-36 minority. Frank led his caucus back to the majority, serving as Speaker of the House from 1999 to 2019. His leadership produced many historic moments for our state, including the passage of the marriage equality bill in 2012 (which he had just signed in the photo above). For the last few years, freed of his leadership duties, Frank focused tirelessly on housing and behavioral health. He has helped lead the legislature’s efforts in creating affordable housing through the Housing Trust Fund; expanding healthcare to children through the Apple Health for Kids program; and integrating behavioral health and healthcare systems and building out new facilities such as the UW Behavioral Health Hospital. He also played a key role in our state’s efforts to fund education, make our economy more fair, help workers organize, protect our air and water, and invest in critical infrastructure. On a personal level, Frank has been a mentor and friend who has helped shape my own approach to public service. I’d like to share three moments from my last three years serving in the House with Frank. 
In the 2011 session, Frank collaborated closely with me, Rep. (and now Speaker) Laurie Jinkins, and Sen. David Frockt to develop a challenge to a series of Tim Eyman-backed initiatives that purported to require 2/3 supermajorities for the Legislature to raise taxes. For nearly 20 years, those initiatives had prevented the Legislature from doing anything but cutting services to balance our budgets – and the Supreme Court had rejected multiple challenges on procedural grounds. But in our case, League of Education Voters v. State of Washington, the Supreme Court struck down all of those initiatives and held that the state constitution required that tax bills pass or fail based on the will of a majority of legislators in each chamber. That decision has freed us to make rational policy over the last 10 years as we worked to make our tax system more fair and adequate to meet the needs of the people of Washington. In the 2012 session, I was the House prime sponsor of the marriage equality bill. We had agreed that the Senate would try to pass the bill first, because we did not know if we had a majority in support. My job was to help that effort by proving that we had the votes in the House to pass it. I needed 50 signatures to demonstrate that we had a majority – but I had several colleagues who said that they would vote for the bill but did not want to put their name on it. So for a few days, I was stuck at 49. As House Speaker, Frank had a strong policy of never sponsoring bills so that he could demonstrate that he led the chamber fairly. But when I went to him and asked him to be the 50th sponsor, he did not hesitate to break his self-imposed rule and thanked me for asking him. In the 2013 session, in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting, Frank and I worked closely on a bill requiring background checks for all gun purchases. He shut down floor action in the House for days as we worked furiously to marshal the votes for the bill. Although we were unsuccessful that year, the voters passed the bill as Initiative 594 in November 2014, and Washington began its sustained work to enact gun violence prevention legislation, continuing to this day. In all of those efforts – and many others – Frank’s passion, skilled organizing, and strong progressive values helped achieve success. I am certain that dozens of my legislative colleagues could tell similar stories about the issues on which he has improved the lives of people in our state. 
Frank, thank you for your service and commitment to the people of Washington. I will miss serving with you. Thanks for taking the time to read my newsletter. This will conclude my series of e-newsletters on the 2024 legislative session. 
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