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West African Village Weighs Using Genetically Modified Mosquitoes In Malaria Fight (scientificamerican.com)
New submitter omaha393 writes: A public engagement campaign is underway in the hopes of convincing Burkina Faso residents to allow the release of genetically modified mosquitoes to combat deadly mosquito-borne pathogens. GM mosquitoes rely on a technology called "gene drives." Different gene drives offer different solutions, typically leading to subsequent broods being sterile, predominantly male, resistant to infection or nonviable due to toxic traits. Researchers in this case are only in the preliminary stages of releasing sterile males but hope to begin wider releases of GM mosquitoes in about 6 years.
Burkina Faso is not the only country to pursue GM mosquitoes in efforts to prevent disease. Brazil has become a testing ground for wide release, and last fall voters in Florida Keys approved measures to begin releasing GM mosquitoes to fight the spread of Zika. Both the WHO and the U.S. FDA have approved the technique, but skeptics are critical of the method.
Burkina Faso is not the only country to pursue GM mosquitoes in efforts to prevent disease. Brazil has become a testing ground for wide release, and last fall voters in Florida Keys approved measures to begin releasing GM mosquitoes to fight the spread of Zika. Both the WHO and the U.S. FDA have approved the technique, but skeptics are critical of the method.
I think your underestimating how much suffering malaria causes. Malaria is nasty stuff. It's super painful , leaves you completely unable to get out of bed , you run huge fevers , and because the body can't really mount an antigen defence against it , you'll get it over and over and over again. The end result is it paralyses entire regions by making huge portions of the workforce perpetually sick and this has contributed hugely to Africa's economic misfortunes. A society where almost everyone of age can work is a society where people can work their way out of poverty and that means cleaner water , better tended environments and cheaper government
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Honestly I'm cautiously optimistic about GM stuff in general, though I think gene patents should be abolished to weaken the more reckless influences of the profit motive. If you can engineer important nutrient production into a staple crop, or selectively graft in specific traits from wild relatives to make your crops able to survive an extra three weeks of flooding, or months without water like a resurrection plant, it seems like it might be irresponsible *not* to do so. Just make sure it's subjected to thorough independent testing against unintended consequences.
Gene Drives though are in a whole different terrifying league. That's no longer just a modified organism, that's an organism with advanced bacterial DNA-editing tools grafted into it. We've only just recently stolen powerful cutting-edge gene editing tools from bacteria, the potential implications of which we're only beginning to imagine, and are now talking about installing them into complex organisms where they will tend to spread throughout the entire species - a decision that can never be undone short of extinction. All other changes could be potentially reverted, but only by releasing another Gene Drive into the population - it can remove anything except itself.
Now, if we could count on the GD only doing what it was supposed to, that would be scary enough. The lines between species are much fuzzier than we imagine, and the potential for strange interactions is vast. We might accidentally wipe out all mosquitoes and relatives, a wide family of important pollinating insects, rather than just the disease-carrying species we were aiming for. But even worse, the one constant thing in genetics is mutation - and so any gene drive that doesn't lead to the extinction of its host species will eventually mutate, and now we have a misprogrammed gene-editor spreading through the population doing who-knows-what. Or alternately, there's now some extremely powerful gene-editing tools in the organism, the product of billions of generations more evolution than anything else in its genome, and nature does seem to love to find a way to put useful genes to work.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
On one hand yay potentially end suffering on the other increase population
This is nonsense. Better health does NOT lead to increased population growth. I leads to a decrease. As parents are more assured that their children will survive and be healthy, they invest greater resources into each child's nutrition and education, and have fewer children. This has happened repeatedly many times throughout the world.
Mosquitoes and Mosquito larvae are critical food sources for numerous creatures. No mosquitoes == no larvae == starving little fish, starving bats, starving birds, starving spiders, etc.. etc.. etc...
Only a few species of mosquito transmit malaria. Most do not. The beauty of this extermination gene is that it only affects the targeted species. The population of other mosquitoes will expand to fill the niche, and the little fishes will be fine.