Don’t Eat the Tomacco
If you’re a good Simpsons fan like I know you are (right?) then you certainly remember the episode where Homer and Bart cross-bred tobacco and tomato plants to produce Tomacco, the super-addictive yet disgusting fruit. Well, someone went and actually did it for real!
Rob Baur, a huge Simpsons fan, grafted a tomato plant to a tobacco plant, grew it, and tonight he has proof from the lab that it worked. “What we found was nicotine in the leaves”. said scientist Ray Grimsbo. The plant grew off the tobacco roots and sucked up the nicotine, just like Tomacco on The Simpsons. The lab hasn’t tested if the actual tomato has nicotine in it yet, but they say it probably does. “Generally in the fruit there is more material concentrated because that’s what everything’s going through to produce the fruit for the next generation. I would expect there would be more.” And that would make the real life tomacco plant very poisonous. Rob Baur says he grew the tomacco plant just for fun, just to see if it would really work. But what’s next for him? “I’ll have to review my DVD’s to see if there is more Simpsons science available.”
(The above is the entire blurb since I have a feeling it will disappear from the link above whenever it cycles off the main page.)
Posted Tuesday November 4, 2003 in Interesting by Chris Curtis
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