All previous breads but wanted to comment cause I've done a bit of digging into Senomyx and I think it's worth more eyes on.
What is Senomyx?
A biotech company that creates flavor and aroma additives for food.
What are their products?
Flavor enhancers that help mask bitterness and bring out more sweetness and saltiness in the food we consume.
How does it work?
The company claims to have essentially "reverse engineered" the receptors in humans that react for taste and aroma, and that they are capitalizing on these discoveries to produce chemicals that will make food taste better. Senomyx's chemical compounds will not appear on labels, but will fall under the broad category of "artificial flavors."
How are the flavor enhancers made?
Using HEK293 as a proprietary taste receptor-based assay systems that provide a biochemical or electronic readout when a flavor ingredient interacts with the receptor–how something will taste.
What is HEK293?
Human Embryonic Kidney cells from experiment 293…
Basically, flavor additives are created using aborted human kidney cells…
Anyway, Senomyx was founded by Lubert Stryer, who did a lot of research into how light interacts with biological macromolecules and florescence. A famous student of his, Richard Haugland, did a lot of further research into florescence in chemistry, biochemistry, and biophysics…
Richard founded a company called Molecular Probe, which was sold to Invitrogen which produces biotechnology products regarding polymerase chain reactions, reverse transcription, cloning, culturing, stem cell production, cell therapy, regenerative medicine, immunotherapy DNA/RNA purification, among other things.
Invitrogen was later merged with Applied Biosystems (research into biochemicals, genetic engineering, DNA sequencing, and diagnostic research) creating Life Technologies (not much info found but they did mess with reagents) which was later acquired by Thermo Fisher (merger of Thermo Electron and Fisher Scientific), can't find much info on Thermo Electron but Fisher was involved in pharmaceutical and biotech companies, including research and development labs…
Anyway, back to Dick Haugland, several charities and foundations were created in his name operating in Asia, though it seems only Starfish Education and Tondo Foundation seem to remain
Smells spoopy.
Call to dig