NATION : Reassurances on Space Tomato
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WASHINGTON — NASA today assured nervous teachers that tomato seeds exposed to cosmic radiation and then sent to millions of students for a classroom experiment are extremely unlikely to produce poisonous fruit.
“We took every health and safety precaution in designing this program,” said Robert Brown, director of NASA’s educational affairs division. “We assured ourselves there is no deleterious effects expected from this experiment, any more than the tomatoes you’d buy in the supermarket or grow in your own garden.”
The Los Angeles Times today reported that a memo about the project said there is a “remote possibility that radiation-caused mutations could cause the plants to produce toxic fruit.” (Story A3)
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