Democracy Dies in Darkness

Genetic engineering was meant to save chestnut trees. Then there was a mistake.

A potential labelling error was the latest in a series of concerns for the American Chestnut Foundation, driving the nonprofit to pull support for a genetically engineered tree meant resurrect an iconic American species.

By
December 24, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EST
A young American chestnut tree grows in a field at a SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry field research station in Syracuse, N.Y., on July 14, 2022. (Lauren Petracca for The Washington Post)
8 min

For nearly a decade, Jared Westbrook has worked on resurrecting the American chestnut, an iconic tree that nearly vanished from the United States a century ago.

The American Chestnut Foundation, a nonprofit where Westbrook is director of science, has poured years of work into a line of chestnuts genetically engineered to endure a deadly disease infecting them, an effort meant to be one of the best hopes for its survival. Then an October visit to a chestnut field in Indiana delivered a blow to that vision.