You paint this as being a 'gmo posterchild' when clearly, it is humans, scrambling with Every technology at our disposal, to save a species. Your whole rambling post harbors the implicit notion that 'GMO BAD, "Natural" GOOD' with no statement to support that backward notion.
The GM strains are superior in apples for a plethora of reasons, or they would use your obscure, bitter, non-browning, and less disease resistant apples requiring even more pesticides. But they do not.
I concede that quite likely we can use thousand year old tech to accomplish these goals. However the timeframe may be much longer (omitting red tape) for a result, and time is of the essence.
If you can substantiate the unsaid evils of GM vs breeding by selected random mutations, please, be my guest.
I am not even anti-GM. Nowhere in my comment did I say GM was evil. Go back and actually read. I'm trying to point out a fact: mass selection has advantages, GMO in the "gene splicing" way is here is not necessary, and is a _political_ liability. You want to reforest the wild with GMO organisms? It won't be me trying to stop you, but others definitely will. So it's a dumb way to do it.
BTW, what I am talking about is not "thousand year old tech" -- mass selection breeding is under a century old. Luther Burbank died in 1926. And mass selection is now done with marker assistance, a very modern "GM" technology.
_Would_ that medieval monks knew anything about breeding and mass selection. They did not.
Also you might want to do some research before making claims about non-browning apples that you can't back up with facts.
It is you who are violating the community standards of HN with your personal attacks. Do not call someone's comments drivel -- especially if you can't even be bothered to read them.
Planting a ton of Chestnut trees, maybe mixing in come Chinese genes, and re-breeding the ones that seem immune is probably the fastest, cheapest way to get immune trees again.
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Side thought, is the company making GMO Chestnuts going to have IP on the seeds? That seems like it would create some bad incentives recreate this whole scenario with other tree species -Kill all the 'native', free trees of some species, reintroduce your expensive super-tree.
No. The ACF's only problem is insufficient funding -> insufficient production.
There have been and are blight resistant trees developed through conventional breeding programs.
I have hybrids on my own property that are blight resistant. There are some that are 95%+ American chestnut genetics and are not blight susceptible. There are programmes in both Canada and the U.S. breeding these trees.
Marker assisted selection might be used which I suppose is a kind of GM technology, but there is no need to resort to gene _editing_ or _splicing_. That is a far more expensive and has the disadvantage of having extremely bad PR.
Same thing for the non-browning apple, BTW. There was no _need_ beyond availability of funding and various ag department/company politics to resort to GM for that. There have been non-browning apple strains around since the 19th century.
I should also point out that there are rare instances of what appear to be naturally blight resistant mature trees in the wild found here or there. Maybe they're natural hybrids, or just lucky to avoid the blight, but if you find one, various breeding groups would love to know.