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Simpsons Fan Creates Real Tomacco Plant
An anonymous reader writes "So, according to a KPTV newscast, a Simpsons fan with too much time on his hands grafted a tobacco plant and a tomato plant and, ta-da: tomacco! Leaves and most likely the fruit (yes, tomato is a fruit technically) contain nicotine. Delicious AND deadly!" Simpsonschannel.com has a small news piece on the breakthrough, but in a Frink-like move, although scientists have found "nicotine in the leaves", it turns out "the lab hasn't tested if the actual tomato has nicotine in it yet, but they say it probably does."
It will be low calorie, high in vitamins and addictive. At least you get something for your nicotine poisoning.
Fight Spammers!
Start them early with Tomacco's! They'll start craving vegetables.. then just give them regular tomatoes. They'll have already made the connection that tomatoes make you feel better!
Also seems like a good way to try to quit smoking?
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. (> <)
Bizarrely enough, there's actually a US Supreme Court Decision on this (Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893)). There was a tariff on fruits, but not veggies, imported from the West Indies. Plaintiff claimed that, since tomatoes are fruits, his imported tomatoes should be exempt from the tariff. The Supremes begged to differ:
... all these are vegetables, which are grown in kitchen gardens, and which, whether eaten cooked or raw, are, like potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets, cauliflower, cabbage, celery and lettuce, usually served at dinner in, with or after the soup, fish or meats which constitute the principal part of the repast, and not, like fruits generally, as dessert.
"Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans and peas. But in the common language of the people
"The attempt to class tomatoes with fruit is not unlike a recent attempt to class beans as seeds, of which Mr. Justice Bradley, speaking for this court, said: 'We do not see why they should be classified as seeds, any more than walnuts should be so classified. Both are seeds in the language of botany or natural history, but not in commerce nor in common parlance.'"
Hence, tomatoes are legally vegetables in the US, botany be damned.
Altria is Phillip Morris... or was, Phillip Morris International changed its name to Altria. Altria owns both Phillip Morris USA (the tobacco company), and Kraft Foods.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
In general, if what you eat has seeds (or is supposed to have seeds, like bananas and certain grapes), they you are eating fruit. We eat corn and bean fruit by strict botanical definitions. "True" vegetables are when we eat the leaves, roots, stems, or flowers.
We (mankind) have done so much genetic manipulation with our crops (for milleniums, not just from Monsanto) that most would never be able to survive without our continued cultivation.
Whether we domsticated them, or they domesticated us, is debatable. From their perspective, it looks like they have enslaved the human race to do their bidding (spread their genes around the would and into the future).
In order to do something like this with marijuana you'd have to resort to genetic engineering.
marko123 sez: "Setting fire to tobacco leaves and breathing in the smoke gave Nicotine, an innocent bystander (in moderation), with potential for improving the brain's concentration levels, a bad name."
A bad name is right.
When the Taino people discovered and rescued that lost Italian guy, Columbus, he saw that they took these dried leaves, rolled them up into a tube, lit them on fire, and breathed in the smoke through their nose. When he asked them what they called that, they replied "tobago".
Tobago is Taino for "tube". It started with a misunderstanding, and that continues to this day.
The original residents of North America have always considered tobacco to be a medicinal plant, to the point of being considered sacred. Science is now finding that nicotine is beneficial to several disorders. Furthermore, there's something in tobacco (other than nicotine) that prevents Parkinson's in two-thirds to three-quarters of people who use it. And yes, that's adjusted for mortality/comorbidity.
As with anything, it's a matter of using it appropriately, or bad things happen.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Having in mind that 1956 was still a year when Lysenko (Stalin's ally, Genetic killer) was at power in Soviet biology, I would be really not sure about the real results produced for this paper...
Good question. I've got one of my own. I'lll preface this by saying that I know absolutely NOTHING about botany, or plants. I can barely identify an oak tree. Come to think of it, I'm not sure I can identify an oak tree. Now then,
;)
So, you can graft together a fruit and tobacco, and get a fruit with nicotine. Could you graft a fruit and, oh, I don't know...say...a cannabis plant, and produce a fruit with THC? Would that be illegal? I mean, marijuana is illegal...but is a tomaijuana? (that would be a tomato with THC in it).
Purely theoretical, of course....just wondering and all
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Try hops.
It was reported by Warmke and Davidson (1944) that hop scions grafted onto Cannabis stocks produced cannabinoid resins and this led to interest in the technique as a means of producing such material while avoiding legal restrictions.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
If a Tomarijuana (or some such) plant is ever made (and the insane inflation of the price of marijuana created by the War on Drugs virtually assures that it eventually will be) it won't be done by simple grafting. It will be done with gene splicing, the gene that encodes the THC production in MJ will be inserted into another organism which will then produce THC in it's own cells. I don't know why this hasn't been done yet, it seems almost trivial considering the number of genetically modified crops that already exist. BAKED POTatoes anyone? (sorry) :-]
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
It isn't the nicotine that causes cancer (IIRC) in cigarettes, it's the tar in the lungs, to the greatest degree. Lip cancer (from chew) is predominantly caused by the other things in the chew (such as draino-type chemicals and fiberglass) that agitate the skin over a long period of time.
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