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A University of Maryland research project seeks to juice up the familiar
plant and develop it as a source of proteins for numerous uses by other
industries, August 2005 by Arthur Hirsch.

The tobacco thriving here on the University of Maryland's research farm
looks like the plant that dominated state agriculture for centuries, the
leaves mint green, fuzzy to the touch, long and wide as the blades of a
ceiling fan.

These plants have been to college, though, and might be nearing the
threshold of a future that generations of tobacco farmers would scarcely
recognize.

For one thing, this vision of Maryland tobacco's future is stamped "NO
SMOKING." Think, instead, of tobacco as a component of cosmetics, diet
supplements, medicine or shampoo. Consider high-protein fluids for kidney
dialysis patients, and drugs that might someday be used to treat, of all
things, cancer and heart disease.

It all seems at least as unlikely as the idea that Maryland tobacco has a
future at all. Growing on a testing ground here no bigger than a Major
League Baseball diamond, this tobacco might help resurrect a Maryland
business shrunk to a fragment of its old self since the 1980s, most recently
by a program that has paid farmers millions to stop growing tobacco for
smoking.

Since the buyouts, a question has been hanging in the air, said Gary V.
Hodge, a Southern Maryland regional planner who helped run the tobacco
program that began in 1998, cutting Maryland tobacco sales from 9.58 million
pounds to 1.4 million this year.

"Now what?" Hodge said. "We're trying to answer that question."

He was standing under a hazy sky on the test patch off Route 202 recently
with a group of men involved in the University of Maryland's Alternative
Uses of Tobacco Project. These men have doctoral degrees and business
experience. They are schooled less in the arduous work of bringing tobacco
to local auctions year after year than in chemical extraction technology and
multibillion-dollar markets in pharmaceuticals.

The future of Maryland tobacco and the state's agricultural landscape might
lie there.

Because along with the aroma, taste and nicotine buzz smokers crave, tobacco
offers proteins. Extracted in pure form, the protein might compete with
milk, egg and soy proteins used in sundry ways by industry.

The hope, said Hodge, is to restore the economic impact of Maryland tobacco,
which in 1997 accounted for two-thirds of Southern Maryland's farm income
while growing on less than 5 percent of farmland in those five counties.

Neil A. Belson, president of Pharmacognetics Inc., a biotechnology company
in Port Tobacco and a member of the project team, called the effort part of
a larger shift from petroleum-based to plant-based industrial materials,
"from a hydrocarbon to a carbohydrate economy."

All plants produce proteins and other compounds, but the reason scientists
are so enthusiastic about tobacco in particular is evident even to the
untrained observer visiting the research farm. In a word: volume.

"Bulk is a key appeal of tobacco," Belson said.

The plants can be grown in dense thickets, sprouting leaves nearly as long
as your arm and a couple hands across. Crop science people call all this
green stuff "biomass," and tobacco produces more of it per acre than any
other crop.

That matters when the compounds you're trying to extract constitute very
small percentages of the whole plant. The more mass you start with, the more
of any given material you might get.

This means treating Maryland tobacco in a new and rather brutal way. For
much of its centuries-long history, the plant has been babied step by step.

The Maryland tobacco farmer typically transplants about 6,000 seedlings per
acre in spring and harvests once in late summer. The stalks are raised in
roomy rows, chopped by hand and hung in barns to air dry through the fall
and winter, the dried reddish-brown leaves then carefully stripped off by
hand, tied in fan-like clusters and bundled off to market in spring.
Maryland tobacco farmers could hardly take more care if they were raising
orchids.

Tobacco's steady decline here beginning in the 1980s had much to do with the
difficulty of finding labor to raise it. The Alternative Uses project
suggests a new, mechanized and high-volume tobacco crop that would demand
less labor.

The researchers have devised direct seeding methods to raise about 90,000
plants per acre, harvesting two or three times a year. Leaves harvested by
machine on the research farm recently have been trucked to the University of
Maryland's College Park campus and unloaded at the old creamery, where the
school once made ice cream.

Lately, professors and graduate students working there have run a few tests
on a noisy configuration of conveyors, hammer choppers and a screw press,
cutting about 200 pounds of tobacco leaves into particles as fine as
"McCormick spices," said Y. Martin Lo, an associate professor in the
University of Maryland's Department of Nutrition and Food Science.

Some of the juice has been taken to a laboratory and run through an
elaborate series of spinnings, filtrations, washings, chemical treatments
and cooling to produce a pure protein crystal: colorless, odorless,
tasteless.

Lo said they have produced maybe a couple teaspoons of two different
proteins. It's a small start at a stage of the game where quantity matters
if you are trying to attract investors.

Crop scientist Ray Long knows that only too well from his research at North
Carolina State University in Raleigh, where work on protein extraction and
bio-engineered tobacco began in the 1970s.

Long ruefully recalled a day in the 1990s when a representative of a
chemical company that supplies the cosmetics industry called him asking
about tobacco protein.

"He said they would like to have 50 pounds to do formulations and test in a
market," Long said. "I didn't have 50 grams. ... That has been the
Catch-22."

That is, the research on how to produce large amounts of this pure protein
costs money, which might be available from industry representatives if they
could get large amounts of the material.

The difficulty of inducing the plant to produce significant amounts of a
particular protein by genetic manipulation should "not be trivialized," said
Long's N.C. State colleague, Arthur Weissinger. He estimates it could be 20
years before human vaccines based on tobacco proteins will be produced.

The Maryland research, which does not include genetic engineering,
anticipates results sooner.

By the end of 2006, Lo wrote in an e-mail, researchers hope to have a
blueprint for a protein-producing operation. Such a design on paper would
then be offered "to interested parties such as tobacco farmers or investors
to establish a commercial processing facility adjacent to tobacco
farmlands," Lo said.

Researchers here hope to attract investors while there are farmers around
who know how to grow tobacco, and before too much more farmland is
transformed into subdivisions and shopping centers.

More than 80 percent of Maryland tobacco farmers took the buyout, meaning
they agree never to grow tobacco again for smoking and what the state calls
"similar personal consumption."

That would not include sipping a soft drink that has been given a
nutritional boost with a shot of tobacco protein, or foaming up your hair
with a tobacco-protein shampoo, washing out the smell of a night in some
smoky bar.

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