Once upon a time, the American Chestnut tree dominated the forests of Appalachia, a habitat for wildlife, a source of valuable hardwood, and (though we didn’t know it at the time) a major sink for carbon dioxide. All of that changed when a nasty fungus was accidentally introduced to North America by people importing Asian chestnut varieties. The fungus, Cryphonectria parasitica, causes a devastating disease called chestnut blight, and it has nearly annihilated the American Chestnut population.
Enter biotech.
To many of us on the political left, biotech is almost synonymous with Monsanto and abusive business practices. It is important, though, to understand that genetic modification and other techniques are just tools for changing traits in plants and increasingly in animals. They are neither inherently evil nor inherently good. My purpose is not to defend Monsanto, just to demonstrate the potential of biotech to do good.
Now, back to chestnuts.
The American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project aims to use multiple techniques, including genetic modification and conventional breeding to create chestnut trees that are resistant to blight, with the aim of reestablishing populations in the Eastern United States. Project member Dr. William Powell, writing in The Conversation, reports that he and research partner Dr. Chuck Maynard were able to produce resistant chestnuts by introducing just one gene from bread wheat into the chestnuts 40,000 gene genome:
This wheat gene produces an enzyme called oxalate oxidase (OxO), which detoxifies the oxalate that the fungus uses to form deadly cankers on the stems. This common defense enzyme is found in all grain crops as well as in bananas, strawberries, peanuts and other familiar foods consumed daily by billions of humans and animals, and it’s unrelated to gluten proteins.
Introducing just this gene and a marker leaves the modified chestnut “over 99.999 percent identical to wild-type American chestnuts.” The only difference is that this one doesn’t die from blight. This is in sharp contrast to traditional breeding methods and induced mutagenisis (intentionally causing random mutations and testing the results for the desired trait), which introduce and modify tens of thousands of genes with far less precision.
The Chestnut Research and Restoration Project is a not-for-profit, and the blight-resistant tree Drs. Powelland Maynard and their colleagues have produced will not be patented. Their work demonstrates that biotech is just a set of tools that can be used for many purposes. It has great benefits over traditional methods, and it is not just used by corporate monstrosities to extract profits.
Other examples of biotech for good:
Golden Rice is enriched with vitamin A to prevent blindness in children in developing countries.
GMO bananas will likely be part of the solution to save the banana industry, whose reliance on the Cavendish variety (itself a replacement for an earlier variety that was wiped out) has left it susceptible to disease.
The Rainbow Papaya has been a big success in Hawaii, where the ringspot virus wiped out the industry.