Philosopher's Corner Genome Fidelity and the American Chestnut

摘要

A full-sized American chestnut was a sight to behold: a hundred feet in height, a trunk 10 feet in diameter, covered in white bracts of funky, acrid-smelling flowers. But on a walk through Appalachian forests today, you won't find tasty chestnuts or the tree that bears them. Instead, all you'll see are spindly knee-high twigs sporting chestnut leaves-sprouts from the diseased stumps and roots of yesterday's massive trees. The American chestnut has been functionally extinct for nearly a century. A blight, imported from Asia, killed the trees en masse in the early decades of the twentieth century. Its demise had negative ecological effects-wiping out pollinators and crashing the populations of wildlife that depended on the nuts for food-as well as economic and cultural repercussions, for the tree had been a valuable source of timber as well as a symbol of Appalachian cultural identity and economic self-sufficiency.