By almost any metric, the American chestnut was a perfect tree. Massive, fast-growing, and rot-resistant, it was easy to mill into cabin logs, furniture, fence posts, and railroad ties.
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But the dominance wouldn’t last. In 1904, a forester noticed something odd happening to the chestnuts at the Bronx Zoo in New York. The trees were developing cankers surrounded by strange spotty, orange-yellow patches, [a fungus known as Cryphonectria parasitica.]
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The first petri dish chestnuts were grown in 1995, and progress was steady, if slow. One particular iteration, called the Darling line (after Herb Darling, a conservationist who had supported [researcher William] Powell’s work from its earliest days), was especially promising. On July 12, 2012, a colleague of Powell’s, Linda McGuigan, inserted the OxO gene into Darling 58—and the resulting tree just might be the one that could save the species.
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Genetically speaking, Darling 58 is an entirely American chestnut with one extra gene that gives it a bonus characteristic: resistance to Cryphonectria parasitica.
For its part, the Sierra Club has counseled caution, but it sees Darling 58 as a low environmental risk, since it would be closely monitored. In a comment on the USDA application, the Club noted that while it still “carries some uncertainties,” genetic engineering could, with proper precautions, produce an organism that “provides an environmental benefit.”
