buchbind@agrigene.UUCP (02/14/86)
> > Believe it or not, I know two people who regularly eat an entire > apple, core and all. They have been doing it for years, and > plan to do it tomorrow if they are still alive. My father has been doing it for years. When I was a kid he used to wierd me out by handing me nothing but the stem and asking me to throw it out. An apple has evolved/was designed by God (take your pick) to accomplish the following: disseminated viable seeds. The flesh of the fruit is tasty so that the seeds will get eaten. The seeds are covered by a seed coat that can survive passage through a gut. The seed is then "deposited" by the herbivore at some distance from the maternal tree. A problem to be solved is how to keep the herbivore from chewing on the seed, which contains a lot of nutritious protein, as chewing tends to lower the viability levels to zero. The solution to this problem, used by many plants, is to store a substance (e.g. laetrile, found in the stone fruits and almonds) in the seed that can release cyanide. If the cells are disrupted an enzyme comes in contact with this cyanogenic substance which catalyzes the release of the poison cyanide. Cyanide is also poisonous to plants, so it must be stored in this nonpoisonous form; after the seed has been chewed it no longer matters to the plant that that cyanide kills apple seeds. You must also remember that many herbivores that eat apples are small (e.g. birds) and eat a lot of apples when they are in season. -- Barry Buchbinder (608)221-5000 Agrigenetics Corporation; 5649 East Buckeye Road; Madison WI 53716 USA {{harvard|topaz|seismo}!uwvax!|decvax|ihnp4}!nicmad!agrigene!buchbind
eugene@ames.UUCP (Eugene Miya) (02/17/86)
I heard something to the effect that this was how Alan Turing committed
suicide (note a sub note to net.suicide). I have yet to look it up, but
what I heard from what was "a reliable source...." was that Turing
refined the poison, coated an apple, and took a bite. Supposedily
with dramatic flair. I was thinking of holding a "net.party" in 2000 AD
over AI-List to toast Turing's Philosophy paper which is now known
as the Turing test. Just an idea to make the 50th anniversry of
it's publication. I'll have to check up on his cause of death.
From the Rock of Ages Home for Retired Hackers:
--eugene miya
NASA Ames Research Center
{hplabs,ihnp4,dual,hao,decwrl,allegra}!ames!aurora!eugene
eugene@ames-nas.ARPA
p.s. my cat's out of his bag.andrews@ubc-cs.UUCP (Jamie Andrews) (02/18/86)
In article <1401@ames.UUCP> eugene@ames.UUCP writes: >...what I heard from what was "a reliable source...." was that Turing >refined the poison, coated an apple, and took a bite. This is the theory of Andrew Hodges, the author of Turing's biography, _Alan Turing: The Enigma_. If I remember correctly, Hodges believed himself to be the first person to put forward this theory. We know that there was a half-eaten apple beside Turing's bed, and that he died of poisoning, but no one bothered to test the apple for poison. There is still some question of whether Turing committed suicide, but finding poison on the apple would seem to confirm this. The connection between eating apples and the sexual "sins" for which Turing was vilified is just too strong to be coincidental. --Jamie. ...!ihnp4!alberta!ubc-vision!ubc-cs!andrews "Dr. Parkinson declared 'I'm not surprised to see you here'"