In a quiet, climate-controlled space lives a 150-year-old specimen: a pressed blossom that’s turned brittle with time, its color long faded. The flower is extinct; but not, as it turns out, beyond revival. With help from DNA sequencing and biotech fermentation, scientists have coaxed its scent—never before inhaled by any presently living creature—back into existence.
Future Society, a first-of-its-kind perfume brand developed by beauty biotech firmArcaea, takes scent design to new, futuristic heights. The brand’s debut collection features fragrances derived from the DNA of extinct flowers, bringing the lost smells of Earth’s botanical past into the present. In so doing, it invites a new kind of climate reckoning—an emotional, sensory confrontation with loss. What if we could smell what’s no longer here?
“While we often associate nature with plants, trees, flowers, and animals, the full tree of life reveals a far more expansive view,” Jasmina Aganovic, Future Society’s founder, told Atmos. “And with tools like biotechnology, DNA sequencing, and fermentation, we can now access entirely new branches of the tree, ethically and sustainably, opening up new possibilities for creation.”
The concept of bringing back the scent of extinct flowers started with Ginkgo Bioworks, a Boston-based biotech company founded by five MIT scientists, with an ethos rooted in the lessons of Jurassic Park: that life finds a way. “A lot of the story of biotechnology for the past two decades has been talking about living things through the metaphor of computers and code,” said Christina Agapakis, an interdisciplinary synthetic biologist and former head of creative at Ginkgo Bioworks. “Living things are coded with DNA. Now, life can be programmable.”
At the Harvard University Herbarium, more than 5 million specimens of algae, fungi, and plants are preserved—pressed, labeled, and stored in floor-to-ceiling cabinets that stretch back centuries. Researchers have long used these collections to study biodiversity and evolutionary history. But in a video providing a look inside the Harvard Herbarium, Charles Davis, a professor of organismic and evolutionary biology and curator of vascular plants, underscored that natural history collections are today seeing a renewed purpose for advancing innovation in the face of accelerating climate change and a sixth mass extinction.
Every living thing on this planet uses biology to express the characteristics that make it unique, including the molecules that give it scent. Using small samples of dried specimens of extinct flowers from the Herbarium, researchers at Ginkgo Bioworks sequenced DNA to identify genes that encode fragrance-producing enzymes and understand which scent molecules the flowers may have once produced. From there, they were able to infer what these lost flowers could have smelled like.
Aganovic saw this breakthrough as an opportunity to tell an entirely new kind of story.
Using genetic data, Future Society worked with renowned perfumers to create a collection of six fragrances—what they refer to as “scent-surrections”—each designed to bring a lost bloom back to life. Floating Forest captures the essence of shorea cuspidata, a tree endemic to Borneo that once towered up to 100 feet tall in the island’s tropical forests, but has since vanished due to unsustainable logging practices. Invisible Woods revives the crisp floral notes of wendlandia angustifolia, a shrub-like tree with white blossoms native to India’s western mountain range, driven to extinction by drought. Solar Canopy tells the sweet and fruity story of the hibiscadelphus wilderianus, a relative of the hibiscus that vanished from Hawaii’s southern slopes because of deforestation. The flower was last recorded in 1912.
For Future Society, the story is less about extinction and more about the future. “We talk about the future as if it’s already destined to be apocalyptic,” said Aganovic. “But the future hasn’t been written and we believe it’s more powerful, and more urgent, to focus on what could be.” The brand is hoping to frame conversations about climate action around possibility—not doom—and remind people of their agency. Science is often misunderstood as purely clinical; about numbers, certainty, and utility. “But at its core, science is about curiosity and continued learning. The numbers are just tools, not the point,” she added.
What sets Future Society’s project apart is that it uses science not to prove or optimize, but to engineer something entirely new: a sensory experience that has never existed before. It’s a reminder that as technology advances, so does our ability to imagine and innovate. Science, in this sense, can shape how we feel about the world and remind us of the limits of our current worldview. For Agapakis, this creative use of bioscience is a celebration of life; an exploration of our interconnectedness with other creatures. That, she believes, is what nature has always been about.
Part of the innovation lies in how the project redefines our relationship with nature. The rush to make everything plant-based, Aganovic argues, has created its own sustainability challenges. She sees emerging biotechnology in beauty as a way to move beyond extraction altogether. “Through advances like DNA sequencing, we now have access to nature’s instruction manual,” Aganovic said. “That means we no longer need to extract plants from the Earth or disrupt nature.” By programming organisms like yeast to produce specific scent molecules, ingredients can be created on demand with precision and minimal waste.
Traditional fragrance production, by contrast, is resource-intensive. To produce just a kilo of rose oil, for example, thousands of blossoms are stripped from fields in a process that leaves behind waste such as stems, leaves, and petals—most of which is discarded. Biotechnology has a much cleaner supply chain. “This project demonstrates how biotechnology is opening new doors,” said Aganovic. “We’re no longer limited to what still exists in the soil. We can now imagine fragrance creation without depleting the future.”
Using the same genetic engineering techniques, an immersive exhibition titledResurrecting the Sublime, was designed to create a physical environment through which to experience extinct flowers. Brought to life with support fromIFF, the exhibition is a collaborative work by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Sissel Tolaas, and synthetic biologists at Ginkgo Bioworks led by Agapakis, and uses smell diffusion, props such as lava and limestone boulders, animations, and ambient soundscape to prompt contemplation of humanity’s position within the vastness of nature.
Scent is, after all, one of our most emotionally resonant senses. Research suggests that nearly 75% of our daily emotions are evoked by smell. Unlike vision or language, scent bypasses cultural filters, communicating directly to the nervous system and generating a universally felt sensation that is deeply human. That makes it a uniquely powerful medium for environmental storytelling, says neuroscientist Karina Del Punta, Ph.D., founder of neuroXnature.
“Reconstructed scents of extinct flowers are not just olfactory curiosities—they’re emotional bridges between what has been lost and what still might be saved,” said Del Punta. Because scent and emotion travel the same neural pathways, when the wearer first encounters the fragrance, armed with the knowledge that the flower is extinct, the scent takes on a new dimension. For some, it may stir a sense of awe or wonder at the possibility of reconnecting with something lost to time. For others, it might evoke reverence or even quiet grief. In a single breath, these fragrances make the invisible visible; the distant immediate.
“They can transform extinction from an abstract concept into an intimate, embodied experience where scent becomes more than a sensation—it becomes a story we carry,” said Del Punta. “These emotional encounters help us internalize the stakes of the climate crisis—not just intellectually, but viscerally. And that’s what inspires people to protect what is still here.”
model Sara Hiromi hair, makeup, and styling Regina Harris
Biome
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