I recently learned via X/Twitter the sad news that Bill Powell, a biologist at SUNY-ESF in Syracuse who spent decades using genetic engineering to try to restore the American chestnut tree, had died of cancern at the age of 67.
I met Powell in the fall of 2018 when I traveled to New Paltz, New York to attend the meeting of the state chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation, while reporting a story about the American chestnut tree for the New York Times Magazine. The people at the meeting, held in the modest conference room of one of those nondescript hotels that populate the nation’s interstate highway interchanges, were a kind of fan club for Powell, who had dedicated his career to the tree they loved.
As I describe in my story, the American chestnut was once one of the great trees of the eastern American forest. It was brought down in the early 1900s by a deadly fungus that had been accidentally imported from Asia. For almost a century, various people tried to bring the tree back, usually through cross-breeding of American chestnut with blight-resistant species from Asia. But the genetics of blight resistance turned out to be complicated, and none of the breeding projects really panned out.
Powell had a new idea: use a newer, more technological approach — genetic engineering — to introduce one gene that could essentially disable the blight fungus and allow the chestnut to thrive again. His “Eureka moment,” as he put it, came in 1997. That’s when he realized a fungus-blocking gene from wheat could perhaps be the key to blight tolerance for the chestnut.
Twenty-one years later, when I visited, he was still working on the chestnut. It baffles me that someone can wake up every day, year after year, and work on the same thing — that there are people who are motivated to push the same rock another inch or two up the same hill. I would have long ago let that rock go and found another one to push (and probably a third, and a fourth). But I’m glad there are people like Powell, because it often takes those sorts of people to get difficult and important things done.
Powell, whose work uniform was jeans and a flannel shirt, struck me as unfailingly mild-mannered, self-effacing and unflappable. I never knew him to get worked up about anything. Yet I got the impression that he was quietly frustrated with the government’s regulatory process for genetically engineered organisms, which his tree needed to go through before it could be planted in the forest, and not just a few research plots. Around the time I visited, he was in the process of submitting thousands of pages of research and documentation to the U.S. Department of Agriculture to start the review process.
Five years later, the government is still reviewing. In the meantime there’s been a change in administration, and any number of statements about the urgency of the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis. Yet none of that urgency seems to have filtered down to the bureaucrats who are charged with deciding whether this tree will be allowed to play a role in responding to these challenges.
A genetically engineered tree intended to be planted in natural forests is a new thing, and it makes sense to scrutinize it carefully. Yet at some point, the scrutiny has to come to an end, so we can move forward. There has been a lot of hand-wringing about whether America can still do big things, or whether we’ve become too risk-averse and timid. The cumbersome handling of the transgenic chestnut is surely a strike for the no-we-can’t-do-big-things side of the argument.
(Andy Newhouse, the scientist who is leading the project Powell started, tells me he expects a decision by sometime next year. Even then, there will likely be some uncertainty about whether the Environmental Protection Agency will insist on regulating the tree as a pesticide, which could be a major impediment to widespread planting.)
I also worry about the long timeline of chestnut restoration. It will be a multi-generation process, and those who start it will need to hand it off to others to finish the job. The generation that experienced the pre-blight chestnut forest is gone, but there are still people who heard about that forest from their parents or grandparents. Those were the sorts of people who filled the meeting room where I met Powell.
Once that generation passes on, the American chestnut will depend on people for whom it is an abstraction — something known only from history books or stories like mine. Whether people without a personal connection to the tree can be motivated to do the hard, often tedious work of planting and nurturing it until it can survive on its own is, in my mind, a big question mark.
Already one can visit orchards of hybrid chestnuts that were planted 10 or 20 years ago, probably with a lot of hope and optimism, and that have since succumbed to neglect, as the excitement wore off and landowners moved on to other things. The five years the chestnut has sat in regulatory limbo are five years of lost energy and enthusiasm from the generation that is probably the most motivated we’ll ever have to restore the chestnut.
Powell was clearly someone who was dedicated to the chestnut without having a direct personal memory of it. The scientists he trained, who are carrying on the work, seem to have that dedication, too. So that gives me some hope. But we will need a lot more people like that.
It strikes me that we also need more scientists like Powell.
Powell was different from most scientists I’ve met. The stereotypical scientist, encouraged by funding agencies and private philanthropists, pursues “high-impact” science defined by metrics like paper citations and publications in big-name journals like Science and Nature. That’s what gets you the fancy speaking invitations, big grants, lucrative named professorships and so on.
Powell pursued a different kind of impact. He arranged his career around solving a practical — and to be honest, not very sexy — scientific problem: how to enable the American chestnut to survive in an environment infested with chestnut blight. He published plenty of papers, but not what you would call “big” papers. According to Google Scholar, his top-cited paper, published in BMC Plant Biology, has 284 citations. That is certainly a respectable number, but not one that’s going to get you a Nobel or a professorship at a fancy university.
Powell’s early death is especially sad because, at least when I visited, he was hoping to expand his work on the chestnut to other trees that have been devastated by invasive pests, such as elm and ash. I never directly heard this from him, but I suspect that his cancer diagnosis may have prevented him from getting this dream off the ground.
Nevertheless, at the end of his career, Powell had something real, tangible and meaningful to show for his work: a new tree. Few scientists — indeed, few people — can say that.
There are any numbers of clichés along the lines of “those who plant trees do so for the next generation.” Powell embodied that spirit and took it to a higher level. I hope to see the tree he created flourish within my lifetime — and perhaps to even plant one of them myself.
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Thanks Gabe. This is a beautiful and moving remembrance.