There is a good chance in 10 years we will look back and ask ourselves why the heck it took us so long to allow the genetically engineered chestnuts.
There is a big difference between genetic engineering to remove a species from existence vs reversing a bad thing we did and protect a species from going extinct. Our duty is to protect nature from us, and not not intervening when we destroy it. We did this accidentally by introducing the fungus. It is therefore Our duty to protect the chestnut by any means we have to reverse the damage we did, and restore equilibrium
I was unfamiliar with the chestnut debacle until I read The Overstory - I immediately put the book down and went to read about chestnuts being wiped out in droves.
This is exciting. The American Chestnut is an amazing tree that once grew with trunks as wide as a car. The article did not mention that once the blight was discovered, there was somewhat of a panic to harvest them, which rather reduced the genetic diversity and ruined the possibility of any natural resistance. The horrendous effect our species has on the diversity of life is incredibly sad, re: Dodos and Carrier Pigeons and likely thousands of other unique species. But I would not cry if the biting mosquito that spreads disease, the bacteria that causes wet dog smell, and Cryphonectria parasitica went extinct never to appear again.
> But I would not cry if the biting mosquito that spreads disease, the bacteria that causes wet dog smell, and Cryphonectria parasitica went extinct never to appear again.
Remember when Mao tried that with evil evil sparrows stealing seeds from the party and caused the greatest famine in human history? Fun times.
Interestingly, the disease carrying mosquito is an introduced/invasive species, so eradication in many parts of the world would be repairing the damage that humans caused.
> would not cry if the biting mosquito that spreads disease [...] went extinct
Now now, ecological disasters are only permitted if they make a few people temporarily very wealthy.
Globally improving everyone and their descendants' life a bit, without even paying for it, is just not okay. They can just constantly fumigate themselves with decreasingly effective chemicals to deal with it.
My dog had a terrible yeast allergy. His paws would swell, his hair would fall out. He was constantly itching. We had to bathe him twice a week with what was basically a shampoo form of Vagistat, and every day had to coat his paw pads in actual Vagistat, and in between the toes and pads. Oh and tons of steroids 10mg 2x day.
He HATED it, but it kept him itch free, and he never smelled like wet dog.
The steroids also served a second function we didn't know at the time, they kept his brain tumor under control for about a year until we found it and had grown too big to be controlled any longer. So it gave us an extra year with him before we had to put him down after 2 days in an induced coma trying to get the seizures to stop.
I'm glad to see the Sierra Club on board with the GMO path forward. A couple of interesting links on this topic below. See the second link for how impressively massive these trees were before the blight killed them off.
Very interesting article. I wonder about the second and third order effects of genetic engineering, but I would say I’m optimistic about a tree that’s engineered to survive a blight, whereas engineering crops so they can survive being soaked in cancer-causing poison that kills everything else in the field —- and then eating them —- seems far more concerning.
You should really read more about how modern herbicides work. Glyphosate disrupts a specific enzyme that only plants use. That's why genetic engineering works so well for resistance to it, you can simply eliminate the vulnerability.
The issue isn't that it's cancer causing (there's next to no chance it is, the issues are with the surfactants). The real issue is that weeds are evolving to also have glyphosate resistance, as would be expected when such evolutionary pressure is applied.
On the other hand, engineering corn to produce Bt toxin, which is harmless to mammals, such that less broad-spectrum insecticide must be applied to get the crop to harvest, seems like a straightforward win.
The toxin only affects insects which actually eat the corn, so it shouldn't be contributing to the alarming crash in insect population we've been seeing worldwide.
This is traditional cross breeding, not genetic engineering per se. Although I have to wonder why one way seems natural and the other not, when they are both guided by human intervention.
Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.
As a West Coast native, I wasn't familiar with this rather significant piece of American Natural History, until I started reading The Overstory, by Richard Powers. I highly recommend the book, it features several heartfelt narratives about the various people who have come to this country to start their own 'roots'.
I hope we can help the American Chestnut recover. From the descriptions in the novel above, it must have been quite a beautiful scene to have such large, hearty, majestic trees, dumping bushels of shelf stable food, and of course the beautiful color changes of deciduous trees.
The article goes into some genetic modifications to the chestnut, which is always a wonderfully hot topic. I'm glad to see the technology being used outside of securing corporate profits, but I still fear our hubris can lead to a disastrous outcome in the ecosystem. We're smart, but we're not always good at realizing our limitations.
If chestnut trees were wiped out by 1940, that means Mel Tormé & Bob Wells, writing The Christmas Song in 1946 ("chestnuts roasting on an open fire"), were already being nostalgic.
The bight is believed to have come from trees introduced from east Asia. Here in the Pacific North West there are plenty of chestnut trees. Last autumn I picked like 4 or 5 full shopping bags full of edible chestnuts. They were delicious. I’m not sure if it is from American, Chinese or even Japanese chestnuts trees though.
It is highly likely that Mel Tormé and Bob Wells were roasting the east Asian chestnuts over the open fire.
EDIT: And I just found out that Bob Wells was born in Raymond, Washington. So it is entirely likely that the chestnuts that he picket and roasted in his youth were similar to the once you can pick today in the Pacific North West.
Interesting, because in Europe we have Cameraria ohridella [0] which wreak havoc on horse chestnuts. The moth replicates like crazy and the only recourse is collecting and burning fallen leaves every year. Luckily it looks worse than it is for the trees, they loose their leaves in August, but by then most of a years photosynthesis is done ( just losing like 17%)
Anyhow American chestnuts are bad hosts for the moths, so a lot of newly planted chestnuts are the American variant.
I hate leaf-miners with a passion. I planted a bunch of citrus trees a while ago, and citrus leaf-miners (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllocnistis_citrella) took a great liking to them. They nearly killed a few of the trees – and this is in a backyard with me attending to them pretty much every day. I hate to think of the industrial-scale agricultural damage these little jerks must inflict on commercial citrus orchards.
But, they seem to be really hard to combat. Efforts to do so (without blanket use of synthetic pesticides) are few, for whatever reason, and anecdotally of questionable efficacy (I managed to track down some pheremone-driven leaf-miner moth traps, which caught a lot of the buggers but didn't really solve anything).
Eventually I figured out that a combination of neem oil and spinosad (Captain Jack's Deadbug Brew) would kill the larval ones, but it didn't kill the eggs and so it would have to be applied every 4 days or so in order to make any progress. I. guess things like that are one of the reasons organic produce is more expensive – some of these things that nature throws at you are hard to combat without using broad-spectrum poison.
Horse chestnuts and chestnuts are different genera, though both have "American" and "European" species. The American horse chestnut is often called the "buckeye". The nuts are vaguely reminiscent of each other, but the horse chestnuts and real chestnuts aren't closely related.
This may seem pedantic, but it's sort of important, as real chestnuts are edible (and delicious), while horse chestnuts are toxic to human beings.
There is an old chestnut orchard in the Santa Cruz mountains above Silicon Valley that has the Asian, European AND American chestnut species. American chestnut has the smallest nuts of the three, but they are the sweetest and best tasting.
Are the Asian and European varieties different in other important qualities? The article mentions straight grain and rot resistance, besides trunk size.
Curiously, resistance to oxalic acid is also a question in human health. We are protected by the symbiotic bacteria Oxalobacter formigenes, which normally functions to prevent oxalate kidney stones and is lost with some antibiotic treatments. So my first thought was to find a similar microbe that degrades oxalic acid and teach it to live on chestnut trees.
It's not exactly what you're proposing, but the CHV1 virus attacks C. parasitica and it's being used to combat it in Europe. I'm surprised the article didn't mention it.
Indeed, however Oxalobacter formigenes is not widely present in all human biomes, even those without antibiotic therapy.
I have attempted to garner the interest of major enzyme corporation (Novozymes, for example) in mass producing the oxalate degrading enzyme through fermentation, but no response.
I thought the Dunstan Chestnut was an American Chestnut that was blight resistant. I have one growing in my yard for the last 4 years and it's doing fine.
Reading that page, I think the problem is that that hybrid might be insufficiently derived from the American chestnut for wide-scale replanting of it to count as conservation.
Last surviving mature tree. There are vast numbers of saplings all over Appalachia. They die quickly as they mature, but the roots are alive and keep producing new sprouts. As the article points out, in some areas where the coal companies took all the soil away (and therefore the fungus spores), the chestnuts can reach significant size before they get infected and die, but they always will get the blight eventually.
My parents grew chestnuts on their farm, when my father was still alive. They were mostly American, with a bit of Chinese for blight resistance, and did pretty well. I've long wondered if regular breeding might have done the trick, if we'd spent the past century trying. Keep back-breeding for more American properties, but resistant, too. For my parents, tent caterpillars were more of a problem.
The goal can be accomplished through hybridization and backcrossing, with marker assisted selection.
I have a Chinese-American F1 hybrid growing here on my farm that is in its 8th year doing very well. I keep meaning to get some more, since I don't get consistent pollination on it.
But the seeds from these hybrid trees will not breed true in the next generation meaning that some of the characteristics of your hybrid will not be in the plants grown from it's seeds.
I worked in a plant pathology lab (Dr. Fulbright) at Michigan State University in 2007-08 which was studying C. parasitica. I would run to the fields on Fridays and collect samples to look at under a microscope. Behind my family’s land in northern Michigan, we have American chestnuts that were one of the few remaining stands in the state. They seemed to have some better luck than the rest, though they never grew too tall.
It would be wonderful for the Chinese chestnut to get the spotlight it deserves!
Chestnut wood has many desirable properties such as rot resistance which lowers the need for toxic wood preservatives. It makes great roofing shingles.
I recently bought a house in a wooded area. In the backyard was a large old tree that I could not identify. After much searching I figured out that it was a chestnut tree! The article says they are the "perfect tree", but the chestnuts are incredibly sharp and tough. Very painful to step on.
Green spiny balls of death with nuts inside? That's a Chinese chestnut if so, we have two or three on our property. Deer love them but I'm not a huge fan.
I hope similar efforts at genetic modification can save American ash trees, which are being wiped out by the Emerald Ash Borer.
In my childhood town in the Midwest my street was lined with massive 80 year old ashes that shaded and sheltered the neighborhood. Most of them have now died and been cut down.
There are multiple factors involved with both collapses. Chestnut trees were planted in dense clusters in parks and along streets so their growth intermingled. This extreme unnatural density enabled pathogens to spread.
Carrier pigeons were delicious and easy eating. Rampant hunting had already crashed the population at that time.
[+] [-] mikesabbagh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] libraryatnight|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Maursault|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Swizec|5 years ago|reply
Remember when Mao tried that with evil evil sparrows stealing seeds from the party and caused the greatest famine in human history? Fun times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign
[+] [-] zizee|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scoundreller|5 years ago|reply
Now now, ecological disasters are only permitted if they make a few people temporarily very wealthy.
Globally improving everyone and their descendants' life a bit, without even paying for it, is just not okay. They can just constantly fumigate themselves with decreasingly effective chemicals to deal with it.
[+] [-] p1mrx|5 years ago|reply
Is wet dog smell caused by some particular bacteria, or would this be more like wiping out an entire ecosystem?
[+] [-] jermaustin1|5 years ago|reply
My dog had a terrible yeast allergy. His paws would swell, his hair would fall out. He was constantly itching. We had to bathe him twice a week with what was basically a shampoo form of Vagistat, and every day had to coat his paw pads in actual Vagistat, and in between the toes and pads. Oh and tons of steroids 10mg 2x day.
He HATED it, but it kept him itch free, and he never smelled like wet dog.
The steroids also served a second function we didn't know at the time, they kept his brain tumor under control for about a year until we found it and had grown too big to be controlled any longer. So it gave us an extra year with him before we had to put him down after 2 days in an induced coma trying to get the seizures to stop.
[+] [-] julienchastang|5 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/magazine/american-chestnu...
https://www.denverpost.com/2012/12/08/volunteers-work-to-rev...
[+] [-] burlesona|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xxpor|5 years ago|reply
The issue isn't that it's cancer causing (there's next to no chance it is, the issues are with the surfactants). The real issue is that weeds are evolving to also have glyphosate resistance, as would be expected when such evolutionary pressure is applied.
[+] [-] samatman|5 years ago|reply
The toxin only affects insects which actually eat the corn, so it shouldn't be contributing to the alarming crash in insect population we've been seeing worldwide.
[+] [-] Isamu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] not2b|5 years ago|reply
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
[+] [-] samhuk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] desine|5 years ago|reply
I hope we can help the American Chestnut recover. From the descriptions in the novel above, it must have been quite a beautiful scene to have such large, hearty, majestic trees, dumping bushels of shelf stable food, and of course the beautiful color changes of deciduous trees.
The article goes into some genetic modifications to the chestnut, which is always a wonderfully hot topic. I'm glad to see the technology being used outside of securing corporate profits, but I still fear our hubris can lead to a disastrous outcome in the ecosystem. We're smart, but we're not always good at realizing our limitations.
Wonderful article, thanks for sharing.
[+] [-] rdiddly|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runarberg|5 years ago|reply
It is highly likely that Mel Tormé and Bob Wells were roasting the east Asian chestnuts over the open fire.
EDIT: And I just found out that Bob Wells was born in Raymond, Washington. So it is entirely likely that the chestnuts that he picket and roasted in his youth were similar to the once you can pick today in the Pacific North West.
[+] [-] scorpion95|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] leipert|5 years ago|reply
Anyhow American chestnuts are bad hosts for the moths, so a lot of newly planted chestnuts are the American variant.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse-chestnut_leaf_miner
[+] [-] type_enthusiast|5 years ago|reply
But, they seem to be really hard to combat. Efforts to do so (without blanket use of synthetic pesticides) are few, for whatever reason, and anecdotally of questionable efficacy (I managed to track down some pheremone-driven leaf-miner moth traps, which caught a lot of the buggers but didn't really solve anything).
Eventually I figured out that a combination of neem oil and spinosad (Captain Jack's Deadbug Brew) would kill the larval ones, but it didn't kill the eggs and so it would have to be applied every 4 days or so in order to make any progress. I. guess things like that are one of the reasons organic produce is more expensive – some of these things that nature throws at you are hard to combat without using broad-spectrum poison.
[+] [-] Turing_Machine|5 years ago|reply
This may seem pedantic, but it's sort of important, as real chestnuts are edible (and delicious), while horse chestnuts are toxic to human beings.
[+] [-] whyenot|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whyenot|5 years ago|reply
http://skylinechestnuts.com/about2.html
[+] [-] fernly|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] scythe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xeeeeeeeeeeenu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevespang|5 years ago|reply
I have attempted to garner the interest of major enzyme corporation (Novozymes, for example) in mass producing the oxalate degrading enzyme through fermentation, but no response.
[+] [-] billfor|5 years ago|reply
https://chestnuthilltreefarm.com/learning-center/dunstan-che...
[+] [-] Ericson2314|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egberts|5 years ago|reply
It was a lone tree on a hillside for miles around.
Those nuts too are still being harvest for biogenetic rework.
[+] [-] not2b|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giantg2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisseldo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CapitalistCartr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluGill|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|5 years ago|reply
I have a Chinese-American F1 hybrid growing here on my farm that is in its 8th year doing very well. I keep meaning to get some more, since I don't get consistent pollination on it.
[+] [-] UncleOxidant|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csstanton|5 years ago|reply
It would be wonderful for the Chinese chestnut to get the spotlight it deserves!
[+] [-] ZeroFries|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0x53|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jgrubb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] odonnellryan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skillpass|5 years ago|reply
In my childhood town in the Midwest my street was lined with massive 80 year old ashes that shaded and sheltered the neighborhood. Most of them have now died and been cut down.
[+] [-] zeristor|5 years ago|reply
It seems the pigeons ate the nuts, and the also plummeted in numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_chestnut
[+] [-] m0llusk|5 years ago|reply
Carrier pigeons were delicious and easy eating. Rampant hunting had already crashed the population at that time.