GMO could bring back the American chestnut. But should it?

Edward Kashmer has fond memories of the American chestnut tree. As a child in the 1930s in western Pennsylvania, he and his playmates would make use of the small, sweet nuts produced by the trees.

“We couldn’t afford golf balls,” he says. “So we used chestnuts.”

Today, on the wall of his apartment in a retirement community in Jamesville, New York, is a regulator clock with an American chestnut cabinet that he says he carved in the 1990s. Mr. Kashmer, who says he owned a woodworking business for 20 years, points out the straightness and closeness of the wood’s grain. “What makes it perfect are the wormholes,” he says indicating the pinpoints bored by insects.

American chestnut trees were once plentiful from Maine to Georgia. But around 1904, a fungus clinging to a Japanese chestnut tree came to New York City. The spores spread on the wind, and within a

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