WASHINGTON - On Monday, in a low-lying tract of southern Georgia’s pine belt, a half-dozen workers planted row upon row of twig-like poplar trees.
“We’ve had people tell us it’s impossible,” Ms Maddie Hall, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said of her dream to deploy genetic engineering on behalf of the climate. But she and her colleagues have also found believers – enough to invest US$36 million in the 4-year-old company. “They have some encouraging results,” said Professor Donald Ort, a University of Illinois geneticist whose plant experiments helped inspire Living Carbon’s technology. But he added that the notion that greenhouse results will translate to success in the real world is “not a slam dunk”.
Scientists have spent decades trying to take over where evolution left off. In 2019, Prof Ort and his colleagues announced that they had genetically hacked tobacco plants to photosynthesise more efficiently. In a field accustomed to glacial progress and heavy regulation, Living Carbon has moved fast and freely. The gene gun-modified poplars avoided a set of federal regulations of genetically modified organisms that can stall biotech projects for years. By contrast, a team of scientists who genetically engineered a blight-resistant chestnut tree using the same bacterium method employed earlier by Living Carbon have been awaiting a decision since 2020.
In contrast to fast-growing pines, hardwoods that grow in bottomlands like these produce wood so slowly that a landowner might get only one harvest in a lifetime, Mr Stanley said. He hopes Living Carbon’s “elite seedlings” will allow him to grow bottomland trees and make money faster. “We’re taking a timber rotation of 50 to 60 years, and we’re cutting that in half,” he said. “It’s totally a win-win.”Forest geneticists were less sanguine about Living Carbon’s trees.