Word: tobacco
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...murmur, hopes rise. The car stops, the stadium organist sweeps into the regal strains of Pomp and Circumstance, and the crowd exults. Out steps Albert Walter ("Sparky") Lyle. He sheds his warmup jacket with measured nonchalance and strides toward the pitcher's mound, one cheek distended by chewing tobacco. A few practice throws, a couple of spits, and Sparky is once again ready to try to quell a crisis...
Rice that looks and tastes like wheat? A plant that yields both tomatoes and potatoes? Strong Turkish tobacco that burns as smoothly as mild Virginia leaf? Such unlikely hybrids may now be a little closer to reality. Last week an Atomic Energy Commission researcher announced that he had achieved a long-elusive goal: the successful fusion of two different species of plant cells into a hybrid that has characteristics of both its "parents" and is capable of reproduction...
...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...
Carlson has tried the same experiment with weirder combinations-carrots and tobacco, for instance-but was unable to get the fused cells to reproduce. The problem, he says, is probably only technical, involving such variable factors as temperature and light conditions. If it can be solved, there seems to be no reason why the same cell-fusing technique cannot be used to breed totally new plants that have the most desirable features of their parents...
Paulucci, 54, an Italian immigrant's son, started in the food business helping his mother sell home-canned pasta in her living room. In 1947 he borrowed $2,500 and created Chun King, the purveyor of canned Chinese food. He sold out to tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds in 1966 for $63 million in cash, later started Jeno's Inc., a producer of frozen pizza and other foods. Last year Jeno's sales were $50 million. Customers apparently like the products better than Consumer Reports does; in the June issue it rated several types of Jeno...