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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.
Today's Dilbert seems apropos.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
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.
I don't know about your particular species, but humans did not evolve millions of years to eat the shit that JUST GROWS around us. Most of the shit we ate for the last millions of years is gone... what we eat is what we BREED AND CULTIVATE.
We're "civilized" now. We cultivate, and genetically-engineer the food we need, and exterminate species that we find sub-optimal when new "frankenfoods" are found.
This is not new. It predates all corporations, industrialization, etc. We've been doing this ever since we discovered agriculture and the domestication of animals, which was a few tens of thousands of years ago.
Cows and chickens are frankenanimals. Corn and wheat are frankenfoods. We use genetically-engineered felines (cats) for industrial (pest control) and emotional purposes (pets). We breed qualities into and out of living organism according to our needs.
If you're going to attack Monsanto because of the dangers of new, more efficient ways to genetically-engineer life, at least realize that we've been doing this for a long, long time. We have had our disasters and our successes, but already our nutrition is based on thousands of years of Frankenfoods.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Breeding is not equal to genetical engineering. There is no way to do transgenetic breeding, iow. to introduce genes from one species into another species by breeding. With GE, it's no problem at all; bioluminous tabacco plants (with firefly genes) anyone?
Consider this before you claim GE is harmless or nothing new.