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Genetic engineering promised to restore the American chestnut tree. Now, the fallout from a lab mistake has the conservation community at odds.

In 1904, the forester for the Bronx Zoo noticed something unusual. Some of the zoo’s trees were sick. They looked wilted and scorched, with ugly cankers growing out of them. Hermann Merkel called in a mycologist, a fungus expert. By the time William A. Murrill figured out the cause two years later, the disease had spread as far south as Virginia. And that is how the great chestnut blight began. Within just a few decades, most American chestnuts were gone, whole forests wiped out by something we couldn’t see (at least not without a microscope). Today, we don’t fully appreciate w...