The Darling 58 Debacle
LATE ONE FRIDAY evening in December 2023, the American Chestnut Foundation (TACF) issued a stunning press release announcing the end of a years-long effort to genetically engineer a disease-resistant American chestnut tree. For years, researchers have been trying to figure out a way to save the tree, an iconic North American species that has been devastated by blight. But the modified trees that the foundation was experimenting with, dubbed “Darling 58,” were defective. Their growth was stunted, they had lost their ability to fight off disease, and many of them had died. For proponents of genetic engineering (GE), the news was a major setback. To those of us who prefer less extreme measures, however, it was a reprieve. Until the early 1900s, the American chestnut tree was common across the Eastern United States and was an important component of the forest ecosystem that provided food for Indigenous peoples as well as for wildlife. Then disaster hit. The spread of an introduced blight devastated the species. This prompted dramatic but failed attempts by scientists, foresters, and government agencies to try to prevent the spread of the blight, caused by a foreign fungus called Cryphonectria parasitica, a native to East and Southeast Asia that made its way into Europe and North America in the early 1900s. These efforts included cutting down countless American chestnuts, including healthy ones that might have been able to tolerate the disease. Today, an estimated 4 million American chestnuts still exist in the forests of the eastern US. Most of these have sprouted from the stumps of the felled giants, but some are large survivors that never succumbed to the disease. Efforts are underway to build the population back, but there are two camps. On one side, anti-GMO American chestnut restoration enthusiasts are working to bring the chestnut back naturally. The other camp, which advocates for GE interventions, believes in a faster approach. And it has a lot of backing. Anne Petermann, co-founder and executive director of Global Justice Ecology Project, reports on the lessons learned from failed attempts to genetically engineer the American chestnut.
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