Gene drive used to turn all female mosquitos sterile

There are reasonable worries about something like this but I'm in favour because malaria really does kill an awful lot of people. We have already massively changed insect populations around the world with land use changes, species introductions and pesticides (including the continuously needed mosquito control). Also, I would think that a gene drive that eliminates populations is self-limiting, to the extent that it works, whereas other genetic interventions would stay around indefinitely and be subject to mutation at any point.

Edit: I think the greatest ecological change would be as a consequence of the increase in human impact that followed the increase in wellbeing in the worst affected areas. I'm not going to begrudge that.

How does the saying go?

The best laid plans of mice and men always work out exactly as predicted and never suffer from unintended consequences.

Just like cane toads and prickly pear.

https://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/17793/20151027/elep...

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-southern-afric...

http://www.krugerpark.co.za/krugerpark-times-2-1-elephants-1...

Which would be bad enough. These gene drives are extinction weapons. If they get into something with a wide range and high importance to any given ecosystem, well, I hope you took wildlife documentaries of it while it was still there.

As for any kind of bizarre viral-mediated horizontal gene transfer scenario, there's no more risk of this happening than for any other harmful bit of another species' genome. This is the kind of thing that can, in particular circumstances quite unlike these, occur over evolutionary time.

But on the face of it, it's absurd; there's tons of potentially harmful genetic material out there, just oodles of all manner of virus even, that can't infect humans for the simple reason that .. it can't. This isn't unknowable magic.

In the infinitely more likely scenario that gene drive is used maliciously, it would still be quite easy to do genetic screening, and thus fairly easy to avoid having compromised offspring.

The 'doomsday' scenario for gene drive is malicious use for ecological destruction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Malaria_Eradication_P...

https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...

Huge amounts of DDT are maybe not the greatest way to accomplish this, but it was highly effective.

Avoiding these millions of deaths per year will just increase populations in parts of the world where resources are already scarce. It could lead to ecological collapse, which very well could result in more human death all-at-once than the Mosquitos were causing over time.

Now, I hate to advocate for letting people die - that's obviously something we as a species aren't going to do - but I feel like we care about population control for every single species but ourselves.

I worry that all of our modern medicine and championing of mother nature could eventually be our demise in the long-term, even if all of these things provide incredible benefits in the short-term.

We are, after all, just really smart animals. In any environment where a single species eliminates all threats to itself, it becomes the biggest threat to itself in terms of competing for resources. We are better at managing resources than any other species, but to a fault. Eventually we'll bite off more than we can chew.

I'm sure plenty of you will think that what I have said here is evil (even I feel that way a little bit), but I think that this really could be a credible threat to humanity ~200 year down the line.

the gene drive isn't ready for use in the field. Doublesex is so central to insect sex determination that every species we have looked at has a version, and the ones in closely related species are similar enough that the gene-drive construct could potentially hop species. While targeting other mosquitos might not be a terrible thing, we probably want to have a clear idea of potential issues before releasing anything like this into the wild.

> Malaria is only carried by a tiny number of mosquito species. Of the thousands of species only something like a dozen actually matter to humans. We can target exactly the ones we want and even better : nothing stops us from maintaining a population in some labs somewhere.

If it turns out they matter in any significant way, contrary to various impact analysis... we just release them back into the environment.

The current cost of not wiping out those few mosquito species is about half a million dead children. Imagine that someone was nuking a mid sized American city every year and you could stop it right now but you'd prefer to wait for a slightly more athsteticly pleasing solution.

How much blood would you be willing to let stain your soul .

Mosquitoes are the main transmission vector for malaria, which kills more than half a million people every year. This is literally one of the biggest problems in the world.

But sterilizing the females will inevitably lead to genocide of an entire range of pollinators that could have devastating impact in parts of the World that depend upon them more than we appreciate or understand today and we won't realise until it is too late.

“This is precisely the area that the researchers, from Imperial College in the UK, targeted with their gene drive system. Males that carry one or two copies of the edited version of the doublesex gene develop perfectly normally and are fertile. Females with only one copy also develop normally. In all these cases, these animals will experience gene editing, and all their offspring will end up receiving a copy of the edited version of the gene from them. And females where both copies have been edited develop with a mix of male and female traits and can't reproduce.”

So the majority of offspring carrying the trait can reproduce. The gene drive mechanism ensures that while the change reduces fitness, it still spreads through the population.

It does this, because even if the gene drive modification only exists on one chromosome, it will copy itself to the other chromosome.

Those mosquitoes had it coming for a long, long time.

But I have only now thought out of a different reason. Basically we had the choice of either living with malaria mosquitoes or converting all of wetland into dry land, completely destroying ecosystem that was there. But now we have option of just eliminating mosquitoes while leaving the rest of wetland intact. To me it does sound like a plan.

I'm a little dubious myself, but I do hate mosquito bites, and I don't even live in a malaria zone.