Thanks to Dr. Evil and his flying monkeys at Monsanto, there are no shortage of examples of GMO done wrong. But in states and countries around the world where tobacco is still an important crop (like here in my dear Carolina, where trendy folks and happy families bike the American Tobacco Trail and nosh at Brightleaf Square), both GMO and the Evil Weed are suddenly starting to look pretty darn good, recently by fighting Ebola, and now too by enabling your carbon-neutral wanderlust:
Boeing Co. and state-owned South African Airways SOC Ltd. agreed to cooperate to produce jet fuel from a new type of tobacco plant to reduce environmental pollution. The partners will use SkyNRG’s hybrid plant Solaris, which can be grown for energy crops by farmers instead of traditional tobacco, the companies said today in a statement. Initially, the oil from the plant’s seeds, effectively nicotine-free, will be refined into the fuel.
If you find yourself wondering why tobacco is suddenly gaining so much momentum as a GMO plant, here's the story:
1. Tobacco has been renowned for centuries for its ability to grow like Topsy on the most marginal of soils and in otherwise unfavorable hot, drought-prone climates.
2. It's a great big (and quite beautiful) plant producing giant leaves in abundance even when grown close-spaced, thus cranking out eye-popping yields in terms of pounds-per-acre.
3. In the lab, tobacco plant cells have long been favored by plant molecular biologists for the unusual ease with which they can be genetically manipulated, using the scary-sounding (but quite benign) "gene gun" technology.
4. The plant's leaves are adept at producing high yields of proteins, such as the 'plantibodies' now being tested to treat Ebola patients, at low cost. Cheap is good.
5. Tobacco is easy to grow in greenhouses or even in suitably illuminated caverns or mines, thus (so the thinking goes) out of the natural biosphere in easy-to-guard quarters.
6. No one in his right mind eats tobacco plants.
For all these reasons, up-and-coming young bio-pharmaceutical companies have increasingly been looking at tobacco as the plant of choice in the new manufacturing technology of 'pharming' (growing tomorrow's life-saving protein-based drugs in plants). And now, tobacco is even flying the friendly skies, yielding aviation- and climate-friendly biofuel.
Sadly, I'm a pack-a-day man, myself. Sir Walter Raleigh really was such a stupid get. But, thanks to GMO technology, tobacco is starting to make up for its past sins.