In a message dated 09/06/00 6:12:13 PM Eastern Daylight Time, chet@chetbacon.com writes: << http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/chilis990511.html >> Chet, Thanks. Went to the site and enjoyed the article. There is one great however, however. Now it says my patron saint, ol' Willie Scoville, was an Austrian pharmacist. I went looking for Wilbur's bio, but didn't turn up much on the web. I did find this contradictory bit in an article which used Scoville as a source: "...environmental factors such as temperature and water influence the pungency. A mild chile cultivar, bred for low levels of pungency and exposed to any type of stress in the field, will become MORE (emphasis added) pungent. Alternately, a relatively hot chile cultivar given optimal environmental conditions will become only moderately pungent. A chile plant that genetically produces nonpungent pods will not produce pungent chile even when grown in a stressed environment. (Now this sentence really helps us to understand the above) To produce pungent chile, both cultivar selection and optimum stress-free growing conditions are important." Oh well, a lit search at the UMass library might better acquaint me with Saint Wilbur the First. Gareth the ChileKnight (and are we ever having chilly nights in western Massachusetts, 33 degrees night before last)