 Technology has moved to a point where we can actually rescue species that are going extinct. There are certain times when intervention is justified, when there's no other alternatives. We have the technology. We have the will. Let's bring these trees back. For generations, the American chestnut dominated East Coast forests, a tree vital to both wildlife and humans, surprised for its bountiful nuts and straight, light, rot-resistant lumber. People used to say chestnut used to follow you from the cradle to the grave because it was made to make cradles and also coffins. You know, if you hear the song around Christmas time of chestnuts roasting at an open fire or the song Slay Ride where they hear the chestnuts going pop, pop, pop, those are American chestnuts. Chestnut blight is totally a man-made problem. It happened when people started importing Asian species of the chestnut tree. People were bringing them in at the turn of the century because they had desirable qualities for, like, nut production. And, you know, at the time, they didn't realize when they imported these, they also import all the microbes on the tree. And so when they brought these trees over, they brought over this fungus called cryfinectria parasitica. The Asian chestnut trees could tolerate that fungus, but the American could not. Blight was found in a Bronx Zoo in 1904. Fast forward to 1950, four billion trees were dead from this disease. Today, there's just sprouts, the trees, like, living in the understory of the forest, and it's re-sprouting and dying back over and over again. The remaining American chestnut population rarely survived to maturity, making the species functionally extinct. Groups like the American Chestnut Foundation are looking for ways to bring back the tree. The American Chestnut Foundation was started in 1983 with this idea that you could basically bring in disease resistance from one variety of plant into another through this process called backcross breeding. That was our bread and butter since 1983. And that worked sort of okay. It turned out, after years and years of breeding, that it's not quite that simple. That there could actually be resistance genes on every single chromosome of the chestnut. That means 12 or more genes that are involved. That complicates things very much. They've made great progress, but so far they've probably made about halfway to full resistance. In the 1990s, members of the New York chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation approached SUNY ESF, asking if there might be a way to use genetic engineering to create a blight-tolerant tree. And we talked to them about it and said, well, this could be done. It's not a quick fix. It'd probably take at least 10 years. Of course, it's taken more than 30 years to do it. The Chestnut Blight fungus secretes an acid that kills the tree bark and, eventually, the tree itself. By inserting a gene from wheat, scientists have found a way to detoxify that acid, creating a blight-resistant American Chestnut tree. It's not perfect. There is some damage that still occurs, but the tree does much better as it's able to grow and reproduce and flower. We have tested it against non-target organisms and know that it's not having any effect other than increasing resistance to chestnut blight. If they gain regulatory approval, the American Chestnut will become the first genetically engineered plant released with the express purpose of spreading in the wild. We want to re-wild the American Chestnut so it can resume evolving on its own, forming its self-sustaining population. To achieve this goal, regulators must grant the Transgenic Tree non-regulated status, a process still under review. Both the Nature Conservancy and the Environmental Defense Fund have filed public comments supporting deregulation. Even the Sierra Club, a group with a history of opposing GMOs, has stated that in this case the technique might prove an environmental benefit. However, there remain a number of skeptics concerned about the implications of releasing a tree engineered in a lab into the wild. The root of all of the concern, the opposition, is this idea of what's natural. A lot of people, again, like things like making hybrids and stuff like that, and that's great. Those have been great trees, but you're making a lot of changes. We have two species, Chinese Chestnut and American Chestnut, that are diverged in evolutionary time by 40 million years. So a lot of changes have occurred in that time. And when you're doing this breeding, you're bringing along a lot of traits from Chinese Chestnut into the American Chestnut genetic background. We are making smaller changes to the tree. Therefore, if you want something that's more original, if you want something that's more already adapted to the forest ecosystem, and genetic engineering is the way to go. We're inserting a single gene into the genome, and otherwise the rest of the genome is the same as the wild American Chestnut. With the creation of a blight-resistant tree and volunteers at the ready, the dream of restoring the American Chestnut appears poised to become a reality. But regulatory obstacles remain. Basically, this tree is at the point where we're ready to get it out to the public. But because we use the techniques of genetic engineering, we have to have another hurdle to get over, and that is the regulatory review. We are working with three agencies, the USDA, the EPA, and the FDA. All three regulate it for different reasons. Regulators typically review GMOs from private companies seeking to patent and sell their creations. But the transgenic American Chestnut would be freely released, a difference that required a fair amount of education on both sides of the process. We've actually started going to the regulators back in 2014, mainly because this was something very new, and we wanted to find out what experiments they would want us to do before we submitted our applications and give us time to do that. We want to make sure we're not creating more problems. So there has to be some kind of evaluation of these things, but there's a double standard. With breeding, we've made huge changes. With biotechnology, it's a smaller change, but it's evaluated under such scrutiny compared to just doing stuff we do regularly with breeding. To me, it should be like breeding and biotech are evaluated in a similar way. The regulatory agencies plan to announce decisions within the next year. Both Powell and Westbrook are cautiously optimistic. I mean, the fact that the USDA has said that they're going to issue a decision in August 2023 is positive. Sometimes these decisions kind of get mired in the process. They'll not consider it or it'll just be in review forever, and they said that they're going to issue a decision. So that's a positive sign. Well, after we get the approvals, we have a big party at first, but it'd be great because that's when we actually start getting the trees out to the public, and we're producing a lot of trees so we can actually get some out right away to the people who've been waiting for these things for 30 years. If they succeed, it could be the beginning of a new chapter in environmental restoration. This can set an example for other groups to be able to use biotechnology for restoration and conservation, and I think that option can and should be open. This Chestnut project is not an end product in and of itself. It's that this is actually developing a roadmap to restore other tree species. I think the Chestnut is kind of an example of an interventionist approach. We are participating in the future of our planet and that we might have some capabilities and responsibilities to correct some of the problems that we've created.