[ExI] Gene Drive and morality

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Tue Sep 25 14:11:00 UTC 2018


Funded by a $100,000,000 grant from Bill Gates biologists have found a way
to make mosquitoes go extinct using CRISPR genetic engineering technology
to connect a sterility gene to a Gene Driver:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.4245

Normally if you have a gene there is only a 50% chance one of your children
will have it too, but with Gene Drive there is a 100% chance they will have
that gene. There is a gene that makes female mosquitoes sterile and they
hooked up that gene to a Gene Drive mechanism in a male mosquito. It would
be illegal to release that mosquito into the wild but they found in the lab
the gene was in 100% of the population in less than 11 generations making
the entire population collapse. A generation in a mosquito is about 40
days.

Mosquitoes carry many diseases, malaria alone killed 450,000 people last
year and made many millions more very sick, nevertheless self styled
guardians of morality are already calling for a moratorium on the use of
this technology in the field and say we should wait decades before letting
one of these insects go free if we ever do.

If that's morality then I'm proud to be immoral.

 John K Clark
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