Decaffeinated, Real Coffee

reeb writes "ABC News Australia reports that Brazilian scientists have discovered a naturally occurring but rare coffee plant, native to Ethiopia, that is 'almost free of caffeine.' Decaf without the genetic engineering?"

Comments

Why are you afraid?

[Tom7]

What is the problem with "genetic engineering"? We've been doing it for ages with breeding, as has "nature."

Re:Why are you afraid?

[cgreuter]

False. Selective beeding and natural selection both involve the addition (through "natural" radiation, "natural" chemical mutagens, and "natural" retroviruses) of genes that weren't there before.

Okay, granted. Various natural things do cause mutation and cross-species gene travel and yes, selective breeding (both natural and 'man-made) do bring those to dominance, but that's still different from genetic engineering.

Natural processes are random, which means that most natural mutations either immediately kill the recipient or cause it to be less successful, therefore removing themselves from the gene pool. The chances of a mutation staying in the gene pool are pretty low. This means that the rate at which we get new species is slow, to the point where you almost never see it happen.

In contrast, engineered species are already immediately viable and, because they're useful to people, will stay in the ecosystem for some time. We know the ecosystem can handle normal evolution reasonably well but we have no idea what this sort of rapid change will do.

I'm not opposed to genetic engineering, BTW. It's just that what the big corps are doing right now strikes me as the biological equivalent of a programmer slapping some code together, testing it a couple of times to make sure it doesn't crash and then installing it on the fly-by-wire system of every airliner in the world.

it's not 'decaffeinated'

[gl4ss]

..it never had any caffeine to start with.

it's cafeine free.. with the same taste apparently.

why would you drink coffee just for the taste is beyond me though when you could be drinking it with caffeine ;)

No. Not Insightful.

[Red Rocket]

What is the problem with "genetic engineering"? We've been doing it for ages with breeding, as has "nature."

That's about as insightful as if people started plowing their SUVs though other peoples' yards and living rooms and then saying, "What's the problem with driving? People have been driving cars for a hundred years."

The difference is we've been driving mostly on roads. And we've been breeding plants and animals using natural methods and reproductive techniques and only being selective about which individuals bred with one another. (Oh, btw, I like the way you put "nature" in quotes. You can almost see the sneer on your face when you typed it. What are you afraid of?)

Genetic engineering removes the guardrails and lets the SUVs into the living rooms. Tinkering with the knobs of life is dangerous when you don't know exactly how it works in the first place. "Hey let's see what happens when we turn on this gene! Ooops. Plague! Who knew? Hey, don't blame us. We were just twiddling the knobs."
There's a reason fish don't breed with strawberries in the natural world. It might not be a good idea to discover exactly what that reason is until we know a whole lot more about the way DNA works.

Re:No. Not Insightful.

[PD]

Argument by analogy is not persuasive. And car analogies are the most annoying. Besides the analogy, the only other point you seem to make is that there is a "normal" mode of genetic change. If I am misunderstanding you, let me know.

But, you haven't done two things, which would have bolstered your argument:

1) You didn't define what and why a certain mode of genetic change is normal. Is it because it's done by nature and not by man? (what's the difference?) Is it because the genetic changes are imprecise? (what about precise changes to DNA that a natural virus causes?)

2) You didn't explain exactly why a natural change in DNA is good, but an artificial one is bad. Your example of "plague" is a red herring. The issue at hand is not about harmful products of genetic change, it's about the mode of the genetic change itself. We've already seen that both natural and artificial genetic changes can arrive at dangerous conclusions, so the argument that artificial genetic changes should be avoided because of that is irrelevant.

Re:No. Not Insightful.

[Sgt York]

I hate to break it to you, but we have been doing genetic engineering in the lab for quite some time now. No one has made plague. No one has made either Pinky or the Brain. No one has made a sqaudron of atomic mutant basketball players to challenge the Globetrotters. The most we have managed is a few things that are resistant to certain diseases, and a lot of things that get funky diseases. And we know that's all it is in many cases, because these animals, plants, and bugs have been monitored for nearly 100 generations in some cases.

It is on the shoulders of this research that groups like Monsato stand. I may disagree with their politics and economics, but I can find little fault in their science. It's nothing revolutionary.

Saying things like "Oops! Plague!" is simply inflammatory and only serves to reveal (and attempt to instill) a visceral fear of the subject. The invocation of the feared demon, Suv the Unimaginable, further demonstrates a need for a visceral reaction ("SUV's and GM are joining forces to destroy Gaia! Come to her aid!"). If you are going to oppose GM, at least use logical arguments and not absurd analogies that try to tie GM with something you may consider the Epitome of Evil.

And by the way, there no rules about interbreeding except the laws of genetics and physics. You can read that as, if it's possible for two species to swap genes, they will. Genes can even flow accross species (Google for lateral or horizontal transfer). Furthermore, there have been thousands of times that a wholly new gene was introduced into an animal, done by nature. Subtract the number of genes in the human genome from the number in a bacillus. That's a tiny fraction of the number of brand new genes that have been introduced. Or do you think that the thing that popped out of the primordial ooze had billions of genes in it, that were divided up amongst its progeny?

There will be flavour loss

[dnamaners]

Unfortunately there will be flavor loss in caffeine free or decaffeinated coffee. it is inevitable as one of the major flavor compounds is the caffeine itself. caffeine has a strong acid (sour) flavor and is quite distinctive as a coffee component. just bite on a caffeine pill some time and compare it to a cup of standard starbucks black roast. i personally prefer a slightly sour (perhaps acrid) coffee with a slight fruity nose. of course decaffeination will not affect the flavor of the average low grade truck stop/diner coffee as that is already very nasty.

Genetic engineering vs breeding

[vg30e]

There are some serious implications to directly manipulating genes as opposed to just going through the natural breeding process. Previously, people just grew and harvested stuff until it had the best of the properties that they wanted, now we are starting to get genes from other places and just kind of force the plant to make it. Until now, it wasn't possible to cross a fish or a spider and a plant that grows corn. This is the danger with trying GMO's as opposed to just planting the seeds of the tallest corn stalk and eating the rest of the corn until all the corn grew tall.

Re:Yippee!

[b-baggins]

So. Genetic engineering by cross breeding for fifty years is good. Genetic engineering by gene insertion in the laboratory to produce the exact same result in 5 years is bad.

I see, now.

Re:Decaf without the genetic engineering?

[jfengel]

I don't touch decaf, but who would genetically engineer decaf beans?

The Maxwell House web site has some puffery to it. When you take out the caffeine, you also take some of the other coffee flavor compounds. A "knockout" coffee plant (which was genetically identical to regular coffee except for lacking the caffeine gene) would taste more like caffeinated coffee than water-process decaffeination.

Of course you'd lose the caffeine taste, which in its pure form is very bitter but in coffee is pleasant, but you wouldn't stay up all night staring at the ceiling, either, and it would still taste pretty good.

Re:Yippee!

[Chris_Jefferson]

I would have expected geeks to be some of the people most against genetic engineering.

We've all had the problem that changing one line of code in a program has huge unexpected consequences in a totally different part of the program, and there is good reason to imagine this problem will be even worse in DNA.

It is possible that there is a number of safeguards when it comes to cross breading. Maybe there isn't, but at the moment we understand very, very little about what most DNA actually does and how it interacts, so I'd perfer to do it the "natural" way in things I want to eat and drink until scientists have a better understanding of exactly what is going on.