Word: nicotiana
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Jamestown also was the first place to find a cash cow and an economic system for exploiting it. The Powhatan smoked a crude indigenous species of tobacco. But in 1612, John Rolfe imported seeds of Nicotiana tabacum, the Spanish-American weed that was already a craze in England. By 1620 the colony had shipped almost 50,000 lbs. home. Fifty years later, Virginia and Maryland would ship 15 million lbs. Tobacco and foodstuffs were grown on privately owned farms. Beginning in 1618, old settlers were offered 100 acres of land, and newcomers who paid their way were given 50 acres...
...experiment, directed by Biologist Peter Carlson at Long Island's Brookhaven National Laboratory, involved two species of wild tobacco called Nicotiana glauca and Nicotiana langsdorffii. In the past, researchers have been able to crossbreed these two common plants by sexual means-fertilizing one plant with the pollen of the other-but many species will simply not breed sexually with others. Carlson, borrowing techniques recently developed by scientists in England and Japan, accomplished the trick with individual cells. First he treated cells from each kind of leaf with an enzyme that dissolves their protective cellulose walls but leaves the rest...
...delicate, wide-leafed tobacco plant (Nicotiana tabacum) became known as "the divine herb" and "the princess of plants." But the foes of tobacco spied the devil's hoofs beneath the princess' skirt. King James I of Great Britain called tobacco "the lively image and pattern of hell," slapped on a big import tax. Louis XIII of France and Czar Michael I decreed penalties for smoking, ranging from death to castration, and Pope Urban VIII threatened excommunication for anyone found smoking in church or on church premises. A signer of the Declaration of Independence, Dr. Benjamin Rush, attacked tobacco on grounds...
Peruvians would often snicker and guffaw as they watched Goodspeed scramble after odd plants. They thought he was gathering aphrodisiacs. But what really interested the botanist was the fact that many of the earth's 60 species of Nicotiana grow among the Andes. There, scientists believe, the Nicotiana tabacum now commonly smoked developed long ago through natural hybridization. Federal tobaccomen think that wild, tough plants from their native mountains can perhaps be crossed with the highly bred, less vigorous tobacco strains now cultivated in the U.S., to increase their resistance to fungi, bacteria, viruses, insects which yearly cost growers...
...simple. The smoker must cease abruptly and completely. Whenever he wants to smoke, he swallows a capsule containing one-eighth grain of lobeline. This is a drug which smells, tastes and affects the human system almost exactly as nicotine does. Nicotine comes from the leaves of any tobacco plant (Nicotiana), lobeline from the blue flower of the Indian tobacco plant (Lobelia inflata), a common U. S. weed which Indians used to smoke with true tobacco leaves. Lobeline, however, is not habit-forming as is nicotine. Dr. Dorsey has never found it necessary for a patient to take more than...