For a moment, though, London's iconic Barbican Centre will let you smell a fragment of our lost history. In the corner of a new AI exhibit, a cuboid hood dangles from the ceiling. Inside are four nozzles that slowly release carefully chosen fragrances into the air around you.

Bark. Pine. Mint. I'm no smell expert, but these are the words that sprang to mind as I slowly inhaled the odors.

The artificial blend is, for now, our best guess at what Hibiscadelphus wilderianus, a tree that once stood on the Hawaiian island of Maui, used to smell like. A small rock sits to the right of the nozzles, hinting at the ancient lava fields where the last specimen was plucked from in 1912. It's a modest visual aid, which is why some virtual environments are included in a short documentary that plays on a loop nearby. Taken as a whole, the installation is powerful enough to drown out the rest of the exhibit and, for a brief moment, transport you to another time and place entirely.

The project was a multi-year collaboration between, among others, Ginkgo Bioworks, a company that specializes in made-to-order microbes, the International Flavors & Fragrances Inc. (IFF), Sissel Tolaas, a prolific smell researcher and Dr. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, a multidisciplinary artist and synthetic biology researcher. As Scientific American explains, it all started when Jason Kelly, the CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks, heard about Scent Trek, an initiative by flavor and fragrance giant Givaudan to capture the molecules around exotic flowers and fruits.

The discussion sparked a question. Would it be possible to pluck an ancient flower buried in the Arctic permafrost and recreate its scent with some advanced gene-sequencing and synthesis? No, it turns out. Christina Agapakis, the company's creative director, asked around and was told that any Arctic remains would be too small or damaged for gene sequencing.

She did some research, though, and found a paper that explained how DNA could be taken from plants and animals preserved in a museum. Elated, Agapakis and Dawn Thompson, formerly head of next-generation sequencing at Ginkgo Bioworks, visited the Harvard University Herbaria (HUH) with a list of extinct flowers. "They went manually through the archives," Ginsberg told Engadget, "trying to work out if Harvard had any rare specimens in the collection." The pair found 20 in the vast archive and managed to take samples from 14, including Hibiscadelphus wilderianus.

"It was very, very difficult... these samples are so degraded by time."

Ginkgo Bioworks struggled at first to extract the necessary DNA. "It was very, very difficult," Ginsberg said. "These samples are so degraded by time." The team eventually sent its samples to the Paleogenomics Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), which crushed them into powder and, with some advanced chemical know-how, extracted usable DNA. Thompson then ran these through a sequencing machine at the Ginkgo Bioworks laboratory in Boston, Massachusetts. Reams of genetic code came out the other side (hallelujah!) though it was unclear which, if any, could produce sesquiterpene synthases, a type of enzyme that could be paired with special yeast to ultimately produce the desired scent molecules.