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Scientists Grow Decaffeinated Coffee Plants
An anonymous reader writes "According to a CBC News story, researchers have genetically modified coffee seedlings to produce up to 70 per cent less caffeine." The Japanese researchers quoted in the article say "..demand for decaffeinated coffee is growing worldwide. Caffeine can trigger palpitations, increase blood pressure and disrupt sleep in sensitive people", and so "..used a tool called RNA interference to genetically engineer the one-year-old plants." Seems like these boffins may be competing against the University Of Hawaii researchers we mentioned last year to take away your buzz.
about as popular as dry water.
Or alcohol-free beer.
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
Today's Dilbert seems apropos.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
Isn't the caffeine in the coffee the point of coffee?
Omnis amans amens
You would have thought that now scientists have decided they were wrong about cholesterol and that eating margarine rather than butter and cutting out eggs was actually "a really bad idea"(TM the food industry) they'd learn to leave alone.
We spent millions of years to evolving to eat the shit that grows around us - not some factory grown crap that no-one actually has any idea about what it's effects on everything else (us, other plants, the biosphere) might be. Some scientist with too much funding and driven by greedy food corporations (Hi Monsanto!) simply is not going to improve on what we evolved to consume.
Sometimes I despair at the thought that a company will produce "Batchelor Chow" (and then realise they have - it's called Pot Noodle in the UK). And that it won't be Matrix style uber-computers feeding us recycled human but uber-corporations run by humans.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
I'm kind of surprised that people are so shocked that someone might actually make, or drink, decaffinated coffee. Its not like this is a perversion of nature or something, the point is that there is a huge market out there for the stuff. Millions of people drink decaf every day.
We may not understand it, but the point is that genetically modifying the plant to produce less caffeine is both safer, and tastes better, than whatever god-awful shit they do to it now.
I guess I just think this is a cool, and potentially profitable use for the level of genetic engineering that we are able to do nowadays. If this kind of stuff works, and makes money, then we get to see the really neat stuff down the road!
You might be surprised to hear this, but coffee has became probably THE national drink of Japan. It's really an jaw-dropping thing because people usually have a concept where they are sipping green tea all the time.
The thing is, though, that they actually seem to genuinely like the stupid beverage (and almost everybody drinks it black - and by almost i mean 99.9% of the people), because they don't really have any perceptable needs for the caffine.
Being that most everybody is extremely health-conscious here*, it is not surprising that they are making "natural" decaf coffee - or I should say, decaf coffee that has not gone through the decaf cycle (which to many, ruins the taste).
* there is a dichotomy here - because while many guys goes on diets and somesuch, they are almost always horrible workaholics and a large percentage smokes and drinks like it's going out of style. So, it's almost like hipocritical health consciousness - but hypocritical or not, the demand is still there for the low-caffine beverage.
My life in the land of the rising sun.