Reddit Science AMA on genetically engineering American chestnuts:
TLDR: This project is using genetic engineering to create American chestnut trees that are blight-resistant so they can restore the species to the wild! It’s really cool and controversial, and if you have ever had questions about GMOs, how they work and whether you should really fear them or not, you should go ask these guys!
The long version:
About 100 years ago, the American chestnut began to effectively go extinct, thanks to an invasive fungus. Before then, there were about 4 billion of them, and they made up about ¼ of forests in eastern North America, and they produced loads and loads of nuts that made up a large part of the natural diet of North American wildlife. It was a huge deal, even though a lot of us who were born since then don’t really notice what a massive change it made to the health of the North American environment.
So this team of scientists has been using genetic engineering to create an American chestnut tree that is resistant to the chestnut blight.
It’s controversial work–it would be the first genetically engineered organism to be deliberately released into the wild–but the team has spent 30 years successfully creating this tree, and now they’re spending the next five years running tests to make sure it’s safe and can earn regulatory approval (assuming the federal situation doesn’t go completely bananas in the near future). Their argument is that this tree is all but identical to native American chestnuts–the only difference is they’ve extracted a single gene from wheat that confers blight resistance and inserted it into the chestnut trees.
Yes, that does make this tree technically a GMO. But GMO is actually a pretty complicated thing, and you don’t get the full story either from Monsanto or from the anti-GMO purists. These guys work for a public college and are not going to patent their work, and they are willing to talk freely about EXACTLY what the process is and what regulatory approval entails and how this technology can be used in both responsible and dangerously irresponsible ways.
Science is cool.
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