Endless Thread - That Old Chestnut

Episode Date: April 26, 2018

One of the nuttiest stories of near extinction and resurrection ever seen in the United States. It involves genetic engineering, warring factions of tree enthusiasts, and a mysterious, destructive power that started at the Bronx Zoo.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the I-Lap at WBUR, Boston. I am on a secret mission in a Tesla with my producer pal Josh Swartz and a man named Brian Clark, a man named Brian Clark who owns this Tesla and whose day is about to get a little bit worse. Oh, well, hopefully it wasn't.

That's a standpipe. Yes, that sound you just heard was the sound of a Tesla taillight getting its wings. Don't worry, everybody's fine, and this happened because Brian was actually pulling off of a dirt road to make way for a utility truck. So for the record, Brian is a responsible driver. He's also one of the only people who knows the secret location we are headed for. Our mission is taken Josh and me to the hill country of central Massachusetts. There are not a lot of roads here.

We've got to go down and come back. back and then out because this area, part of the road has been closed for years. Why was it closed? There's just that it's hardly anybody out here. There's no reason to maintain it. We are deep in this hill country looking for a kind of chimera, a thing that people like Brian dream about finding. And when they find it, they go out of their way to protect it, to keep it secret, keep it safe.

Is this it right here? This thing out in the woods of Massachusetts, is the focus of a century-long project to bring back a symbol of America that has been all but wiped off the face of the earth. It's also the topic of intense scientific debate. People have written songs about it. They've named streets after it. What is this thing? Is this like the rarest tree around here?

Yeah. Yep. It's a tree. The American chestnut tree. A tree at the center of one of the most nutty stories of near extinction and resurrection ever seen in the U.S. Our story involves genetic engineering, warring factions of tree enthusiasts, a mysterious, destructive power that started at the Bronx Zoo of all places. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, hey, Amory.

Hey, Ben. You're ready to talk trees? I thought you'd never ask. But I also kind of thought we did that last week. Different kind of tree. And you know what I want to call this one. Yes, I do, because you've been saying it all week, you dork. Dork, maybe, genius, possibly.

because the title I dreamt up for this episode is That Old Chestnut. I'm Ben Brock Johnson and this is Endless Thread, a show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. I'm here with my producer and co-host, Amory Sievertson. One does not simply walk into our show without saying how it is made. We are coming to you from Boston's NPR station, WBUR. So we know this story because a Redditor who calls himself,

This is Bill Gates, because he is actually Bill Gates. He posed an interesting question to the Ask Reddit community. He wrote, with all the negative headlines dominating the news these days, it can be difficult to spot signs of progress. What makes you optimistic about the future? And one of the responses was, here's some optimism. The American chestnut tree is about to come back,

which begs the question, where did it go? Well, there used to be billions of these trees, but most of them were killed off, which brings us back to the chimera we are searching for in Massachusetts Hill country. Isn't a chimera something that's like an impossibility, like it doesn't exist? Yes, and American chestnut trees almost fit that definition, except there are a few of them that do exist. We know about them because they've been discovered by guys like Larry Bruffey, Arborist,

and Powerline installer. Oh, yeah, we actually were putting this line in right here. Power line. This power line. So I came out to survey the clearing of the trees on this side of the road, and that's when I found this one here on this side. When you saw this tree, did you know exactly what it was and how important it would be? Oh, I did, yeah, yeah, no doubt.

Was your finders fee paid in chestnuts? Yeah, as a matter of fact, it was. Really? He had to collect them himself. Yeah, I collected it myself off the ground here. Okay, so Larry saw the tree, and he told Brian the Tesla guy, and then these guys showed it to you and Josh. Right.

But why is it a secret? It's a secret because it's like one of the only trees like this. It is a full-blown adult. It's glorious. Okay, it's pretty normal looking unless you're a chestnut enthusiast. You know, it has branches and leaves and stuff like that. It doesn't really stand out. But most of this kind of tree dies before it ever gets this big.

It could be part of the key to the future of the species. And so the people who go nuts for American chestnuts, well, they worry about it. Sort of. Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night wondering how it's doing? I can't say that that's happened. But do you think about it when you're not? I do go for stretches where it seems like I'm eating, sleeping, and doing nothing else but think about chestnuts.

But I haven't woken up in the middle of the night thinking about this tree. Okay, so maybe Brian doesn't wake up in a cold sweat thinking about his tree, but he does visit the tree once or twice a year. He makes a pilgrimage. But why make a pilgrimage to basically just say hi to a tree? Well, because the American chestnut tree used to be really important to America. And it could be important again. This is according to Endless Threads resident chestnut expert, Josh.

Josh, welcome. You convinced me to go into the woods with these tree nerds because you said that the American chestnut was once really big. Really, really big. For starters, they could grow up to, 125 feet tall and 12 feet wide, they were so big that loggers used actual dynamite to blow them up into smaller pieces. Mine's blown. Tree blown.

But it wasn't just the individual trees that were big. The species as a whole had a massive footprint. Until the early 1900s, they were so common that people used to say a squirrel could travel from Maine to Georgia on chestnut tree branches alone without ever touching the ground. That's a lot of chestnuts. And a very tired squirrel. So these trees, they were important for what? Lumber? Like, why did people love the American chestnut so much?

So many reasons. As far as chestnut wood goes, if either of you had been born in 1800s, you could have been born into a chestnut cradle, lived your life in a chestnut house, and then get buried in a chestnut coffin. Deep and terrifying. We missed out, Ben.

But the secret sauce of the chestnut tree was really the nuts themselves. You know about chestnuts? I mostly just know the song. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Jack frost nipping at your nose. All right, all right. This winter was long enough.

Josh, you talked to a person who says the nuts were economically important. Yep, his name is Ralph Lutz. He's a historian, and this particular historian has a particular area of focus, Southern Appalachia, which was the heart of the chestnut world,

emphasis on the nut. It was not just a food that was a treat to them. It was a central part of their lives economically, particularly the very poor. And when you had the time of plenty in the autumn, when the nuts were falling like mana from heaven, it was almost a community celebration. So many people were involved in it.

And there were more nuts than people who gather. It was a bounty. There was a woman who once said, a chestnut grove is a better provider than a man, easier to get along with too. But Ralph says chestnuts weren't just a celebrated bounty. They were literally used as currency. People called chestnuts shoe money because you could go to the local store and buy shoes with them. Come September, October, the only commodity they're trading in at the country store to get their groceries is chestnuts.

And the store owner, he couldn't sell $2,000. chestnuts locally because they were all over the place, sometimes inches deep, but he would ship them outside of the area to metropolitan areas. So here in southwestern Virginia, I found records of nuts going to Richmond, going to Philadelphia, going to New York City. If the chestnuts were around and we're dealing with things the way we are now, they'd probably be selling them on eBay or through Amazon. But clearly chestnuts are not so popular here and now, so not really a hot commodity on Amazon or eBay. And the reason is pretty wild. It's a bizarre story that starts back in the day in the Bronx.

So we're going to head to New York City, an American chestnut boom times. Yeah, chestnut vendors in East Coast cities like New York were roasting and hawking the nuts on the streets. Nuts, which probably came from those wholesalers down in Appalachia we were just hearing about. chestnuts were actually called the first fast food. City people were just eaten them up. This is right after the turn of the century. Horses and Ford Model T's are battling for right away in the city. This is the first year of the New York City subway,

the first year that there was a New Year's Eve celebration in Times Square. And here's a journalist named Susan Frankel, who wrote The Book on the American Chestnut. She says chestnuts were like a common thing as American as apple pie or something. But everything changed in 19. Because of something that happened at the Bronx Zoo. So in 1904, the chief gardener for the Bronx Zoo, a guy named Herman Merkel, was making his rounds and noticed that a couple of the trees had something going on with them. They had these sort of orange speckles and signs that some of the branches were dying, and he couldn't figure out what it was.

And so he called in a guy who had been recently appointed as the chief. chief my college as mushroom expert at the botanical gardens across the way. Apparently, there is such a thing as a mushroom expert. This particular mushroom expert is named William Merle, and he is no joke. He went to college when he was 12, and later he became one of the most prominent biologists of the 20th century. He discovered something like 1,500 different kinds of mushrooms. He is a serious dude, but also a seriously odd dude.

He was this guy. He was funny. I came across. He had written three different autobiographies of his life. All had the same sort of pompous tone. He referred to himself in the third person. Has these kind of clunky aphorisms. One of them that I really liked was to be strong and independent, a man doesn't have to drive his lawnmower over his neighbor's chicken coop. I don't even know what that means. I also do not know what that means. I think this is going to have to remain a mystery. Yep. So Merle goes across the street from the botanical garden to the Bronx Zoo to look at this orange speckled rash on the American chestnuts. He studies it. Does he take out a magnifying glass?

Does he twirl his mustache, am I? He did have a beard. He looks kind of hipster, actually. Okay, so maybe he strokes his beard while looking at this mysterious rash. He does whatever a mushroom expert does. And he's like, whoa. This orange stuff, this is bad. Real bad. Basically, Merle says this thing, which would later become known as the chestnut blight, is going to wipe out all the chestnut trees in the region. But nobody believes him. In fact, as the blight starts to do exactly what Merle says it's going to do, the government gets all the big tree mines and some clueless politicians together in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. And someone actually accuses Merle of not doing enough to stop it, of basically,

lying down and letting the blight win. And at that point, he got very offended, and he said, you know, I was on this thing way before you were, and if you think you can do something here, you're out of your mind. The thing is, saying that nothing can be done, even if it is right, isn't often popular. I'll tell you what is popular, though, in Merca. What? Money-making schemes. Particularly in the New York area, when people were starting to lose their trees, people started

looking for anybody who could offer an answer, and you sort of got all of these quacks, basically, out there offering up different remedies. Some funny examples here. Pouring poison on the tree roots, digging holes, and filling them with sulfur, not great ideas. Some people also suggested that the blight was God's punishment for sins and misbehavior, so maybe you could bring back the tree with prayer. People were making money off of the ideas for how to solve this. And Merle was really offended by that because people were paying hundreds of dollars to try to save their trees.

And he knew that nothing, anybody peddled, was going to save a sick chestnut. And this guy was right to be mad. He identified the blight. He said it was going to be epically bad. And by the time Merle died, nearly four billion American chestnut trees had died with him. Not only that, as this massively important tree for the eastern United States was dying off, the Great Depression was looming. The industrialized world was taking hold.

Things for tree lovers were looking pretty grim. Jeez, man. Tell me about it. But wait. There's hope. Emery, there is never hope. Is there hope? Ben, we're talking about trees right around Arbor Day and Earth Day, so there better be some freaking hope. Freaking hope in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience,

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Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcast. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from CitySpace Productions,

the Creative Studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Okay. So we've got this tree that had this huge economic impact and really a cultural impact on the eastern

half of the U.S. We actually looked up the number of chestnut streets around the country, and there are thousands. There are chestnut streets in every state, which makes sense for a tree that some called the perfect tree. But by the time the Great Depression hits, the chestnut blight has destroyed almost all of the adult American chestnut tree population in the U.S. And we say adult, because there's something really interesting about all of this. And I want to bring back endless threads tree nut for a second here, Josh. There are chestnut tree babies, like everywhere, even today? Millions of them, hiding in the forests in plain sight,

growing out of the roots of old chestnut trees that died from the blight, because the blight only infects adult trees. So the babies never fully grow up. They just get old enough to hit puberty and bear fruit once or twice. This sounds like a beautiful young adult fiction book series in the making, like teenage trees just old enough to bear fruit before they go to that big canopy in the sky. That sounds very depressing, but how does the blight get to all of these teen trees and kill them off? Well, when Josh and I were out in the woods, we learned a little bit about this from

Larry and Brian, who were showing us this secret adult surviving tree. The tree had this old wound from a plow hitting it, and Larry and Brian, our guides, were amazed that blight hadn't crept its way in. You got squirrels and blue jays and everything else going up and down the trunk of this tree as soon as it starts bearing nuts. And if there's an open wound, we're not. And if there's an open wound, generally those animals, you know, along with windblows forers, will bring the, will bring the fungus into the wound. Okay. Important to note here that Brian is actually part of a hundred-year-long mission to bring

the American chestnut tree back to its former glory. People consider this one of the most ambitious species restoration project in the world. Yeah, and there's really three ways the tree could come back. Three efforts all happening at the same time. You could even say they're competing, even though. the goal is the same and they might actually work better together. Right. So Brian is part of this first effort. He is a breeder for the American Chestnut Foundation, which is kind of big. It's a nonprofit, mostly volunteers, but these volunteers are everywhere.

The organization is about 35 years into its century-long mission. And Josh, you talked to another breederator further south. I did. His name is Hill Craddock, lives down in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The way he talks about chestnut breeding, you kind of think he was like a chestnut first responder. I mean, if I find out that there's a chestnut tree blooming within a 200-mile radius, we get in the truck and we go. And just to get this straight, this guy in Chattanooga and Brian, the Tesla guy in Massachusetts, they're trying to essentially breed the blight away. Breed trees that can resist the blight, yeah. I think I get this. The idea is you breed a pure American chestnut tree with a Chinese chestnut, which is naturally resistant to the blight.

Exactly. And then you take those hybrids and breed them with pure American chestnuts over and over again for many generations until you get a chestnut tree that's as American as possible, but still has some Chinese genes so it can resist the blight. Here's Hill again. This is artificial selection as opposed to natural selection. In natural selection, of course, nature chooses who lives. an artificial selection, the breeder decides. And so I'm the breeder, and we work in a team and we have a protocol. So we grow the trees. And we're looking for blight resistance and we're looking for American form. I got to say this sounds incredibly tedious even for a tree lover. And the bad news, I guess, is that despite all these efforts,

the perfect Chinese-American hybrid hasn't really been found yet by the breeders. True. But they're getting somewhere and they're not giving up. because these breeders feel like they're trying to bring back a whole part of the American experience that was lost. When I'm in the field, we meet folks who have chestnut stories to tell us. You know, when I was a kid, I went with my grandmother, and we went to pick the chestnut trees, and I complained because she made me carry the bucket, and I didn't want to. And she said, I want you to remember this because the chestnut trees are dying.

It's like there's a personal cultural nostalgia for this thing that we lost in the chestnut blight. What Hill is talking about here is real. Thoreau wrote about chestnuts. Robert Frost wrote a poem about the blight. It's really short, actually. Amory, you want to read it? Sure. It's called Evil Tendencies Cancel. Will the Blight and the Chestnut? The farmers, rather, guess not. It keeps smoldering at the roots and sending up new shoots till another parasite shall come to end the blight. Emery, this poem is perfect because you talk to a whole other contingent of American chestnut lovers who have this other idea of how to save the tree. Yeah, and it's kind of awesome. So if the backcross breeding approach is tree breeding science, this is like biological warfare science,

because there's a way to give the blight a blight of its own. Wait, like the enemy of my enemy is my friend? Exactly. And this has a name. It's called hypovirulence. And there's an expert in all of this. His name is Dennis Fulbright. And he says this actually happened naturally in Europe.

And what was happening in Europe were that the trees, the European chestnut had taken their hit, had become infected, had started to die and actually recovered. The fungus causing the blight, the chestnut blight disease in Europe, had. had a virus. So the fungus itself, that caused a disease, had a disease. This is why European chestnut trees have survived. So Dennis has been trying to use the good virus process, applying the fungus and its virus to chestnut trees to kind of cancel out the blight. He can't be sure how effective this approach is yet, but it could be another piece of the puzzle of bringing the American chestnut back. Fun fact, by the way, when you do get chestnuts in the U.S. these days, more likely than not, they are European or Chinese.

Are holiday chestnuts made in China? Right. Okay, we've got the breeders and the good virus spreaders, but there's one more contingent of chestnut lovers who want to save the tree. They have what I might call the science fiction approach, genetic modification. Who has two thumbs of a science degree in a background in studying chestnut blight? This guy. So I am William Powell, and I'm a professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science

in forestry. I'm also the director of the American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project there. Dr. Powell is almost like a lumberjack crossed with a lab geek, and I do mean that in the best way. Do you guys all wear flannels and have big beards or anything like that, or no? Don't have the beard,

but I do wear flannel. I have it on right now. We joke, but Dr. Powell is at the cutting edge of modern science. He is splicing genes to try to make a pure American chestnut that can fully resist the blight. So we had to figure out, well, what genes do you actually use to enhance resistance to the blight?

And what happened was it was actually kind of a eureka moment. A eureka moment when he found the very powerful gene he had been searching for. It has the not at all confusing name, oxalate oxidase. And I never heard of that gene before, but something clicked in my mind was that, wow, this gene, what it does is it breaks down oxalic acid. Oxalic acid is the thing in the blight that actually kills the chest. nuts trees. Where do you get the oxalate oxidase gene that breaks down the acid that kills the trees? Okay, the one that we are using actually comes from wheat. So we're basically talking about genetically modified organisms here, right?

The boogeyman of modern food genetics? Yeah, and here's the part where we say that Dr. Powell's approach, which he would argue is basically backcross breeding, just sped way up, is pretty controversial. Even among his peers. Some of my colleagues at my college, you know, they used to look at me and say, well, why are you doing this project? You know, it's not going to work. And, you know, it took many, many years to get it to work. I mean, we were kind of starting from scratch. What I like to tell people is we basically had to build the boat before we went fishing.

And once they built the boat, they started seeing a lot of success. Powell's genetically engineered trees work. They actually resist the blight really well. The bat cross breeding is also being successful, but it still has a ways to go. But with our technique, basically, we've kind of jumped ahead of them by baking trees that were as a resistant as the Chinese parents. We should say that every time we brought the GMO debate up with people at the American Chestnut Foundation, they were pretty uncomfortable talking about it. Maybe in part because there's a feeling among some that the GMO effort is forcing a solution in the short term that breeders will accomplish more naturally long term. The makeup of the American Chestnut Foundation has also shifted over time to people who are more pro-GMOs,

whether that's because some people who weren't have been pushed out, hard to say. I saw you did a Reddit AMA last year on the science subreddit, the science community. What was the response like? It's not 100% positive. Obviously, there's still some people, there's groups that are concerned about GMOs. That's in part because if you look at the organizations helping to fund Dr. Powell's work, you will see some names that the anti-GMO crowd definitely recognize. Example, Monsanto.

Do they give you guys funding? So no. They don't give us funding, but they have funded organizations that have given us funding. So I'm going to put that out there right there. So they don't have any direct ties to us. One of the organizations funding Powell's work, though, is technically the New York chapter of the Chestnut Foundation, and Monsanto gives money to them.

So there's a pipeline here. And saying there's no direct connection is tricky. It's all a little murky. Powell also points out that his funding does not come with strings attached. Some people are still worried. Once you put GMO trees out there, you can't take them back. And pollen drifts. So, you know, eventually all the chestnut trees could be genetically modified trees.

This is Lois Brough-Mellekin. She's president of the Massachusetts chapter of the Chestnut Foundation. and she's not a big fan of the GMO approach, in part because the Foundation's eventual plan, one that is already partly in motion, is to give people chestnuts to go out and bury those chestnuts in the woods. And that might be a tough sell, because GMOs have a pretty bad rep right now,

both with the regular people that might eventually plant them and with the farmers that the Foundation imagines partnering with. Another concern here is that Monsanto or some of the other companies that are funding the project out of the goodness of their corporate hearts might be playing a long game. If this GMO approach gets okayed by the federal government, it is a huge deal. It would be the first ever genetically modified plant

used to help save a species. And this might set a precedent. And I think it's almost like a Trojan horse kind of a thing. You know, once this tree gets okayed, then it'll be easier for other trees to get okayed. The idea here being that Monsanto and some of the other companies involved might have diabolical motivations

that they can fight for using this. of the GMO American Chestnut as an argument. Man, who knew that so much controversy could be around a single tree that isn't even really economically important anymore and is basically almost nowhere to be found? I know. So we don't really know yet whether the American Chestnut's future is in the lab or in the forest. But on that economic front, people like Lois and her husband Dennis want to bring the chestnut back in a pretty sweet way. Josh talked to them about it. All right, so I see some Ben and Jerry's pints of ice cream.

Will you explain what's going on? We're attempting to make chestnut ice cream. I take a sweetened chestnut puree and just add it to the ice cream, vanilla ice cream. I have to say, I'm sorry. I feel like I'm about to disappoint you. I'm allergic to nuts. The big reveal. Our endless thread chestnut expert is allergic to nuts, Josh?

You know, Ben, sometimes the thing you love the most is the thing you can't have. But there's also chestnut beer. Oh, you can't have that either, Josh. Thanks a lot, Amory. Okay, so there are kind of niche industries that might spring up if adult American chestnut trees were a thing again in American forests. But it is really interesting just how many people are devoted to this project and this idea of bringing a tree back.

People care about this even if the return of the chestnut won't happen until after they're gone. And maybe it won't ever be as glorious as it once was. Yeah, well, remember Susan Frankel, who told us about the mushroom expert, who identified the blight, she had something to say about this. What is appealing to me about the chestnut story is people having a sense of stake and a sense of affinity in the natural world and having a sense that our existence depends on the trees and animals and plants and the whole sort of biosphere around us and that we have a sense of responsibility to protect it and to do right by it.

This is something that connects to some of what Brian and Larry talked to us about at that lonely surviving chestnut tree in the forest. Here's Larry and then Brian. And it's very, very important to wildlife. I mean, it was a heavy mass-producing, you know, nut crop. You can see all the burrs on the ground here, how productive these trees were. And so not only they produce a lot of nuts for human consumption,

but for all the wildlife species that inhabit the forest areas of New England. It would be great to see it come back into the forest and become a keystone species again someday. I won't be here to see it, but maybe my children or grandchildren will. And that would be the ideal outcome. A vision of a forest that's more vibrant and full of wildlife and a celebrated tree for future generations to gather nuts from or to pour over ice cream or brew beer out of, I can get behind that. this week on Arbor Day. Here's to you, American Chestnut, by breeding hypoveralance or genetic modification, may you rise again.

And see. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station in partnership with Reddit. Our show is a dream realized by Jessica Alpert, who, when we ask if she likes the episode we've put together, she says, W-T-F. Iris Adler is our executive producer, and she makes sure our stories meet the bar of mildly interesting. Mix and sound design by John Parati and Paul Vicus, who whenever we go to record in the field with them,

they remind us... Nature is Fli. Our web producer is Megan Kelly, who looks at our attempts at writing web copy and goes... Our intern is Chris Eulian, who when we put him on a task, he politely says... Oh, my dear. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit,

and whenever we're hanging out, we're just... Animals being bros. Our theme music is by Squelcher. This week's episode, Art is called Happy Little Green Tree. technically not a chestnut, but like the trees themselves, chestnut tree art is scarce these days. It is from Reddit user Eden's Quill.

On Reddit, we are endless underscore thread. If you want to contribute art for an upcoming episode or give us a juicy story tip so we can tell it like we did today, hit us up there. This show was produced by Josh Swartz, also my producer and co-host, Amory Severson. I'm senior producer and host Ben Brock Johnson.

I'll let myself out. I can't stop. They love chestnuts, huh? That's what I'm trying to get at. You know what I mean? See here. These chestnuts, they're going crazy for them. Save this material, Paul.

End of the show. They love chestnuts, you see. I can't get enough of them.