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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."
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It's true that any irritation can cause cancer, but it's the nitrosamines that occur any time you burn a protein in the presnece of nitrogen that are specifcally carcinogenic in tobacco smoke.
For many years I thought that this meant that chewing tobacco was harmless --and I still chew tobacco regularly-- but just a few years ago I looked into making my own and I found to my dismay that the rich flavor of chewing tobacco comes from smoke curing. So, although you're not lighting it up, it is bathed in thick smoke for weeks on end and hence has a thick gooey, and yummy, coating of nitroamines which are definitely carcinogenic.
So, you're right it's not the nicotine, but there is a genuine cancer causing agent in smoke and "smokeless tobacco" which turns out to be a rather bad case of mislabeling because it should properly be called "smoke cured tobacco."
But I still chew tobacco and smoke on occasion. However, I spend a lot of my spare time researching stem cell therapies because I know I'm eventually going to need some replacements.
I think tobacco is an awesome all-American product and I love it. I just wish we could convince our fellow Americans that somatic cell nuclear transfer stem cell therapy was also a good thing. Then we'd have two killer new product lines. Now that's how you boost GDP.