Last week, Philip Morris' funded NC-State researchers announced that they had genetically modified tobacco plants to reduce the levels of some carcinogens in their cured leaves. That got Wired.com investigating the future of tobacco and the cigarette. Now, the FDA's former director of the Office of Tobacco Programs, Mitch Zeller, offered his vision on the best way to reengineer the cigarette.
"I'm convinced that there's very little we can do on the toxicant side," Zeller said. "But imagine a world, however many decades from now, in which the cigarette remains as deadly and toxic as it is today, but it's not addictive because there's no nicotine in it."
From a public health perspective, Zeller thinks that the lack of the main addictive agent in cigarettes would do more for reducing the overall population susceptibility to the dangers of smoking than any amount of biotech tinkering could do in reducing the carcinogens in tobacco.
Zeller, who has been tracking genetic modifications of tobacco since the early 90s, said that even though the tobacco industry has had success on the scientific side of manipulating chemical levels in tobacco leaves, the dangers of smoking could never be eliminated.
"They've already demonstrated they can... reduce the toxicant level in the leaf and reduce the toxicant level a little bit in the finished product," he said. "But the reality is that when you finish with all these modifications, you're going to stuff the leaves into a cigarette and burn it."
And at the end of the day, Zeller pointed out the obvious: inhaling smoke is still inhaling smoke:
There are at least 69 known carcinogens in tobacco smoke.
Let's say they could bring about reductions in 15 or 20 of them, and that's being very charitable. We don't know how big the reductions are and nobody in the tobacco industry can tell you what that actually means in terms of reducing risk. It doesn’t mean anything in public health in terms of reducing harm at the population level.
Check out our post on the history of genetically engineering tobacco to find out how tobacco companies are already modifying tobacco for fun and profit.
See our other posts in this beatblogged investigation of genetically modified tobacco and the future of the cigarette:
Image: Cigarettes in cans, like these from Taiwan, are probably not a major feature of the future of tobacco.