I've always suspected that the plants that humans have always focused on could become more important, that we intuitively have love affairs with certain plants for a deeper reason that has not been revealed yet.
I'm talking mostly about tobacco. When I was a kid in the 70s, they were bringing out all kinds of information about tobacco to get people to be aware and get away from smoking. This is the era that they stopped TV advertising and Surgeon General warnings started showing up on cigarette packs. We started to understand the addictive nature of nicotine, but we also understood that the burning weed was gumming up our lungs with tar. I remember hearing that there were some 300 chemicals in tobacco that we didn't understand. This aspect of the tobacco plant is rarely mentioned. You hear about the handful of chemicals in tobacco that were found to be harmless, but it's not clear to me how harmful these chemicals are if they aren't burned and inhaled. I always wondered if some of those other chemicals weren't things that enhanced health. It seemed likely to me, because you would think that smoking tobacco would kill you a lot faster than it does, unless there is something about the plant that is also helping the body.
I don't know that anybody else is studying this, but you hear about how one of the reasons they didn't outlaw tobacco outright was that there were so many farmers growing it. I thought that it might be a good compromise to force the tobacco companies to look at healthy chemicals in tobacco in order to change the use of the crop from an addictive killer into a beneficial crop.
People have had love affairs with a few other plants, some with no healthy or good use, others with some good and some bad uses. Coca (cocaine), poppies (heroin), marijuana, and coffee come to mind as examples of plants with an addictive use profile. Corn, potatoes, sugar, wheat, and rice are other plant that we've had a long association with.
I tried growing some tobacco for a while. The breeds were available for sale through Seeds of Change (www.seedsofchange.com), a cool seed catalog that touted the benefits of growing tobacco as an insect repellent for other plants in your garden. I bought some seeds and grew the plants next to some of the other vegetables I was trying to grow. They came up very healthy and I was fascinated at how easy they were to grow. One day, when I went down to check on them, I noticed that they looked horrible. They were being devoured by these enormous green worms. While this carnage was going on in my tobacco crop, with me thinking that the advertisements were wrong to say that it repelled insects, I finally noticed the adjacent rows of vegetables were completely bug free. So maybe it was not accurate to say that they repelled insects as much as they attracted them away from other plants.
This isn't the first time that something else was discovered while looking at tobacco. The first virus discovered by man was the tobacco mosaic virus. While concentrating on what was causing problems with tobacco crops, man discovered a whole new kingdom of life.
Recently, I heard a story about scientists using tobacco as a factory for cancer fighting agents. [See Science Friday's 7/28/08 show archives, if you are interested - http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200807253] They did it by infecting the tobacco plant with a virus that then produces the beneficial chemical. While this is another example of a useful symbiotic relationship (see my posting Symbiosis), it is also a good example of our love affair with the tobacco plant yielding a benefit for human health.
We often talk about going bioprospecting in the vanishing rain forests of the Amazon to find new plants with beneficial drugs, but I think we should be looking a little closer at the plants we already have a long relationship with.
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