Also in the medical field, tobacco is being increasingly used as an engine to create new drugs and treatments for existing diseases:

• At the University of Central Florida in Orlando, researchers “grew” insulin in specially-modified tobacco plants and cured diabetes in mice. The head of the study, Prof. Henry Daniell suggests using lettuce as the plant of choice to grow the insulin, as it can be produced without the “stigma” associated with tobacco. However, as tobacco farmers – and an increasing number of drug researchers know – tobacco can be grown in massive quantities in small plots of land and is quite easy to work with in manipulating its genetic code.

• Researchers at the University of Louisville who helped create the Merck-owned drug Gardasil to help fight cervical cancer, are now developing a similar drug using tobacco plants as the production engine that could reduce the cost of the drug from $120 per dose to $1 per dose!

• Perhaps most stunning of all is a UCLA study that appears in the July issue of Archives of Neurology that long-term smokers of cigarettes, cigars or pipes have half the risk of coming down with Parkinson’s Disease.

According to Science News Online, “Author Beate Ritz of the University of California, Los Angeles characterizes the amount of Parkinson’s protection by smoking as moderate. ‘Never-smokers have about a twofold higher risk of Parkinson’s disease than ever-smokers,’ she says.”

That’s hardly “moderate” if you compare the language used when researchers describe the unhealthful effects of smoking. And Ritz states, as you would expect, that because Parkinson’s is relatively rare, “nobody would ever recommend smoking in order to prevent Parkinson’s.” Well, why not recommend cigars or pipes? The risk of cancer and heart disease from cigar or pipe use is only a small fraction of that from cigarette smoking, but that’s a suggestion that would be unacceptable to the non-smoking scientific community, of course.

Brian Vastag’s report on Science News explained “As for how smoking may prevent the disease, ‘nicotine is the likely suspect,’ says study coauthor Harvey Checkoway of the University of Washington in Seattle.

“Robert L. Copeland Jr. Of the Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, D.C. agrees. He points to studies in his lab and elsewhere showing that nicotine protects neurons that generate dopamine, a key signaling molecule in the brain.

“Parkinson’s symptoms appear after patients lost 70 to 80 percent of their dopamine-making neurons.”

Can we say . . . “A cigar a day helps keep Parkinson’s away.” Why not?