1989 California Medfly Attack | Hacker News Reader

1989 California Medfly Attack

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213 pointseindiran99 comments

Eradicating harmful insect species using CRISPR gene drives is so tempting. We could wipe out Medflies with it (without spilling a single drop of pesticide), and even more importantly, we could drive the mosquitoes that cause malaria/yellow fever/dengue/etc to extinction. There are a lot of worries about the side effects, but I'm equally worried about the consequences of failing to use it. There's a lot of attention paid to the 100k coronavirus deaths, and not to minimize those, but they pale in comparison to the equally tragic and preventable malaria deaths which go practically unnoticed.

Early in the days when nuclear physics found application, it promised to bring great benefit to society in addition to its tremendous utility in warfare. There are lots of opinions about this sort of thing, but it is a fact that our society has great difficulty dealing with nuclear waste. Furthermore, while accidents are rare, they have enduring impact in the locations where they occur.

Today, of all days, we all feel the impact of an uncontrolled and exponentially-spreading biological disaster. Gene drive can have a similar impact, if it goes awry.

To wield a weapon of extinction that we barely understand is folly. There are as many opportunities for loss of control through mutation as there are mosquitoes. While the biomechanics probably don't work out, it seems like a bad idea to attempt such an extinction when each of our tiny adversaries are equipped with hypodermic needles and a penchant for mammalian blood.

Your point regarding the consequence of not acting is very well-taken. It only takes a day or two in a country with tropical disease to understand how crippling it is, not just to individuals, but to entire continents of people. The happiness of billions of lives does hang in the balance. Before going with the "nuclear" (or should I write "CRISPR"?) option, one should explore every other avenue to its end.

I'm a physicist -- I see in CRISPR all the good and bad that physicists encountered at the dawn of the nuclear age. Be real, real careful with it.

There are also other issues. Technology has advanced and information is more easily available. Nuclear technology has proliferated - even small countries can nowadays use it, and probably many large companies also could.

Biotech could be harmful in a massive way, done by a much smaller operator.

So "we" don't really get to say. Someone will just use these technologies. This is what Bill Joy wrote of in 2000, in the essay "Why the future doesn't need us". How do we organize society around this different harm dynamic?

EDIT: In some sense, nuclear technology is a great success story. Not used in anger since the second world war. Countries like Italy and Sweden had nuclear programs, but they didn't end up there. (Ariane and Vega solid boosters are Italian for that reason.) Political ways were found to contain it.

I hadn't imagined a large, energy intense company running their own reactor before reading your comment. What an idea to start the morning!

Even factoring in the rare accidents, nuclear energy kills less people per GW and per GW*h than coal (by a factor of 2000) and rooftop solar (by a factor of 10).

The death toll of not using nuclear is higher than that of using it.

The concern is not only about the number of people die.

Large areas become uninhabitable practically forever and people are uprooted, becoming refugees overnight with no chance to go back ever. Suffering also increases through cancers, inability to breed, and/or deformed babies.

Death per kW doesn't capture that picture, I don't know why anyone would optimize for death per kW alone.

The above figures hold true for disabilty-adjusted life years.

Coal does all that too, it's just spread across wider areas and longer time. Japan is somewhat unique in how little flat land there is, typically there would be miles and miles of uninhabited space around a nuke power plant.

Screening thousands of Chernobyl cleanup workers didn't discover elevated cancer risks, as far as I remember the only group that was measurably affected was the people who refused to relocate.

My argument is that you can’t look at dead bodies per kW/h and claim one is better than the other.

It doesn’t incorporate the relocation of potentially tens of millions of people on a single incident. It doesn’t incorporate the political complexities and so on.

People don’t simply look at the probability of getting killed and be fine with being uprooted if something happens. People don’t want to risk being relocated overnight. The death thing isn’t even a concern, most people don’t even believe that it would happen to them.

People are afraid of being relocated but not afraid of being killed? Well then, check how many people were relocated due to hydro and coal quarries.

And they are not happy about it many of the times. Protests are widespread when such facilities are to be built. It’s not happening overnight, they usually get compensated handsomely but people still don’t want it. On nuclear, it’s much more hardcore, you leave overnight to never come back and it’s very unlikely to get fair compensation.

What is hard to understand that people don’t want this to happen to them?

Death? Big deal, people face death through the entire history to preserve their way of life. There are professions where death is an occupational hazard. Nobody cares about death. What's scary is to lose your life in a sense of losing everything that you worked for, some people commit suicide when they lose something that they cared and build through the years.

>Furthermore, while accidents are rare, they have enduring impact in the locations where they occur.

And coal emission, gas spill, oil spill, dam burst, dam construction dont?

>but it is a fact that our society has great difficulty dealing with nuclear waste.

France has no problem.

> >but it is a fact that our society has great difficulty dealing with nuclear waste.

> France has no problem.

France is part of the world, and thus has part of the problem. Maybe France isn't contributing to it, but we as humans own it now.

This is not very practical answer.

France got waste reprocessing to the extent where decades of electricity provided to Paris only leave several glass slabs of waste behind [1].

France has solution to the problem [2], where the rest of the world choses to ignore it while championing solutions that are not really helping.

So, France got the answer.

[1] https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/recycling-nu...

[2] Decarbonization in 10 years: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EYp2uVFVcAEWAoW?format=jpg&name=...

To be fair, France still don't fully know what to do with radioactive waste.

We're kinda good at recycling it (so, indeed not the horrifying process your [1] describes), but the final non reusable waste is in fact just stored where it's produced, waiting for better ideas on what to do with it, so it's not exactly ideal. There are a dozen of publicly funded current research projets on that, so let's cross fingers. Overall, I'd say that our policies are pretty solid to get us towards a good solution in the best possible shape, but I wouldn't say that France got the answer yet.

(Also, old plants deconstruction is a planned problem with currently no planned solutions.)

You have to store high-level waste for hundreds or thousands of years before it's safe.

Heavy metal wastes never become safe. A dump site for cadmium or chromium or lead or arsenic waste will be exactly as hostile to life around it in ten thousand years as it is today. The only way for it to "become safe" over time is for it to leak into the environment and distribute the damage over time. In practice, the "solution" for heavy metal industrial waste is to store it where it's produced and ignore it. Usually in huge open pits, which are just great for the environment around them /s.

I just look at it from a systems engineering perspective and think a whole bunch of nearly-identical systems sharing the same physical layer with no separation between them is terrifyingly vulnerable no matter what you do.

The problem with this sort of thinking is that we don't live in a bubble. Even if we don't study nuclear weapons or biological engineering, our enemies will.

There is also a problem with thinking that everyone that isn't you is an enemy.

At the scale of nations, this line of thinking is very much necessary.

Are you a nation?

No, but he lives in one.

He?

Integers identify as male :)

It's better to have weapons but never need to use them than to need weapons but not have them.

Do note that having weapons makes you infinitely more likely to use them.

And not having them, when someone else has them, makes it infinitely more likely they'll waggle their eyebrows at you and have you quietly comply with their every demand.

Europe doesn't have large militaries, which is fine as long as they're satellite states of the U.S.

And not having them, when someone else has them, makes it infinitely more likely they'll waggle their eyebrows at you and have you quietly comply with their every demand.

European nations don't have large militaries, which is fine as long as they're satellite states of the U.S.

> our society has great difficulty dealing with nuclear waste.

Emotionally, not physically. We let ignorance take over and fear drive decisions.

Your comparison of CRISPR to nuclear bombs and meltdowns just puts it into the irrational fear category.

You said yourself that you’re a physicist. Why do you think that qualifies you to talk about the risks of gene editing with CRISPR?

> You said yourself that you’re a physicist. Why do you think that qualifies you to talk about the risks of gene editing with CRISPR?

He says, on a site devoted to people talking about things about which 99% of them know nothing.

It’s already been shown to not result in what was expected in the trial that was done in Brazil. A total Jurassic park moment. Nature “found a way”.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-49660-6

I feel like everyone missed this news?

> Evidently, rare viable hybrid offspring between the release strain and the Jacobina population are sufficiently robust to be able to reproduce in nature. ... Thus, Jacobina Ae. aegypti are now a mix of three populations. It is unclear how this may affect disease transmission or affect other efforts to control these dangerous vectors.

Uh-oh moment.

A genetic modification designed to spread through a population at higher-than-normal rates of inheritance, spread through a massive population of insects that act as carriers for many rapidly mutating viruses, and that feed on the blood of many different species?

What could go wrong?

Anopheles mosquitoes have killed more people than all the wars in human history combined, so to me the 'what could go wrong' is that we don't do anything to permanently wipe them out.

I'm not saying we shouldn't be careful, but that we should carefully, deliberately drive them to extinction.

The goal should not be to eradicate the mosquitos, but to eradicate Plasmodium, and then even just the ones (most) responsible (if you can call an unicellular organism responsible) for malaria.

Also, ‘only’ about 40 of 460 Anopheles species commonly transmit malaria (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anopheles). We should target those, leaving the others around.

> Anopheles mosquitoes have killed more people than all the wars in human history combined […]

What makes you sure that CRISPR-gone-wrong couldn’t kill even more people?

Could possibly vs the lives already lost and the lives yet to be lost.

I know where my opinion firmly lands: definitely worth considering the options.

Engineering mosquitoes to be unsuitable carriers for malaria (and others) could be a less perilous path.

It would be something like this option:

https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/health-52530828

That’s 100k deaths in the US globally it’s over 350k. The US has effectively eradicated Malaria locally, which is why the 100k deaths are getting so much attention. You need to go much further down the list of US killers to find something we don’t pay much attention to.

> There's a lot of attention paid to the 100k coronavirus deaths, and not to minimize those, but they pale in comparison to the equally tragic and preventable malaria deaths which go practically unnoticed.

Actually, Covid19 has already killed almost as many people this year to date as malaria in 2018, at least according to Wikipedia (400k died of malaria, 360k of Covid19). And this is only after a shutdown of large number regions or countries.

I know this is somewhat besides your original point, but I feel that it is important to bring up, given the trend to downplay Covid19 in some circles.

This response pretty much encapsulates your user name 100%. That said, haven't they already started releasing "GMO" mosquitoes in Brazil?

Just googled it and looks like they did:https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/study-dna-spread-gen...

You've just read an article about bioterrorism and concluded that human engineering of ecology is not only safe but obligatory?

What if I told you that, if there were ever a working and effective gene drive -- instead of just people self-promoting on the basis of such things -- that it could be used as much for evil as it could be used for good?

>we could drive the mosquitoes that cause malaria/yellow fever/dengue/etc to extinction.

How?

"Debug is a group of scientists and engineers developing technology to raise and release sterile mosquitoes to eliminate the ones that carry disease."

And it's used in the real world:

"Today, our scientific paper reporting near-elimination of Aedes aegypti from three neighborhoods in Fresno County"

https://blog.debug.com/2020/04/nature-biotechnology-features...

Releasing sterile mosquitoes wouldn't eliminate the ones that carry disease. that's basically the opposite of natural selection.

"sterile" is an over simplification, with something called gene drive, you can actually introduce sterility into the gene pool in such a way that spreads through the entire population driving it to extinction. Crazy.

I don't see how that could work. Clearly some mosquitoes are going to be resistant to the modification and will survive.

I could explain it but not as well as if you just search for crispr gene drive.

If you wipe out entire species of insects you will decimate life throughout the food chain

Depends on your choice of insect. The world would mostly be fine without mosquitoes. Losing ants would be a big problem. This is one of the big problems with using pesticides on crops, you kill the good stuff too.

We have not lived in a mosquito-less world, you cannot say with justifiable certainty that wiping them out would not devastate birds and other wildlife that have intricate relationships to them in the food web

Devils advocate: mosquitoes and their diseases have been with us since we were rodents.

I would express great concern at this idea, but can understand the temptation.

Why not just use CRISPR to confer malaria etc. immunity in humans?

Genetically modifying all humans with no side effects is far more difficult and ethically dubious than genetically modifying mosquitoes.

  since we were rodents

Humans (well, most, anyway) were never rodents. You have to go back almost to the K-T event even to find a common ancestor.

If that’s your opinion, how do you reconcile it with being ok that Africans suffer mosquitoes and their diseases, but us Westerners don’t?

Gene drive the entire human population? Are you serious? Moreover, that doesn't really help the people today.

There's a documentary on The Earth Liberation Front (ELF) that's really interesting. Many of them had noble goals, but their message was lost in the violence/destruction they caused. The FBI ended up letting one of the worst of them go after a plea deal where he ratted out other members who had moved on with their lives.

Hey, do you have a link to the documentary?

I believe the title of the documentary in question is If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front.

Yes that's the one. Thanks for looking it up. I highly recommend it.

This led me down a rabbit hole into the sterile insect technique, where large numbers of sterile insects are released to reduce the population.

Looks like Alphabet's Verily has been testing it on mosquitoes in Fresno: https://blog.debug.com/2020/04/nature-biotechnology-features...

> large numbers of sterile insects are released to reduce the population

This has been done successfully on the flash-eating screwworm:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/flesh-ea...

Florida has been doing some form of mosquito release for a while. Here’s an example.[1]

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/miami-s-new-mosqu...

> A person or group calling itself "The Breeders" took responsibility for the bioterrorist attack,[4] as financial retaliation for the environmental damage caused by the state's Malathion aerial spraying;

> It was instead ordered that, rather than 1-2 aerial sprayings of the infected communities, more than a dozen sprayings would be necessary over a period of months.[18] In addition, Malathion was no longer used alone, but mixed in a 4:1 ratio with Nu-Lure0 bait to attract insects to the area.[19]

I know, I know, hindsight bias. But it is hard to imagine that an increase in the infestation would not result in an increase of the treatment for said infestation.

Take note, future protestors. Outcomes are the only thing that matters.

Sounds like it worked:

> Subsequently, three months after "The Breeders" announced the medfly release, the state ended its decade-long Malathion program and sought alternate ways to handle destructive insects.

Fair point, I suppose on balance their outcome was indeed successful. Thanks for pointing that out :)

> The group promised to make the aerial spraying program politically and financially impossible through the coordinated release of thousands of medflies.

It's not just that "on balance" they stumbled into accidentally achieving their goal. They achieved exactly what they set out to achieve, in the exact way they planned to achieve it.

Well, the same strategies are used (sterile flies plus pesticide bait), but spinosad replaces malathion. I don't see this being any different without the protests. Pesticides are replaced all the time, like Dursban.

I am absolutely fascinated that some evil genius is out there threatening entomological terrorism.

I thought the same thing. Might make for a nice James Bond movie, complete with a love scene interrupted by a rabid swarm of flies.

That sounds like it’d play quite poorly among viewers.

When I was a little kid in Long Beach I remember some days we couldn't use the drinking fountains at school and stuff like that because they (city? state?) had sprayed for medflies that day. I have no details, it's just a childhood memory.

I had no reason to access that memory except that it's here on HN. As a kid I had no idea there was anything more to it, but thanks to this post, now I do. Neat.

Ironically, I remember the outbreak caused an increase in Malathion spraying, and being warned not to go outside on spraying days.

I remember the spraying and all the containment efforts, but somehow managed to be ignorant of the claimed agro-terrorism (although this was happening during my last year of college and my access to news was limited at best at that phase of my life).

Ditto - I remember the spraying and other control efforts but nothing about it being intentional, which is odd since it seems like a detail which would have gotten a lot of attention.

Same. And in my area we were advised to cover our cars if they were parked outside as there could be minor paint damage from droplets from the spraying.

Was going to say that its really hard to get off of painted surfaces. What a mess.

That was the bait, not the malathion itself.

I was on Stanford campus at the time. The students would hear the helicopters, and run en masse out into the streets to dance in the malathion rain.

Thanks for the article. That's super interesting from several perspectives (eco, ethical, state response to threats).

I'm curious if there was any expert speculation on the identity of the attackers and what they would have likely known wrt the damage that was possible vs the state's reaction to it.

This makes me wonder about the murder hornets showing up in the forests of Washington. Could it have been a misguided person who intentionally introduced them?

Don’t give anyone any bright ideas or we’ll end up with the sodomy geese next.

I don't see any way those wasps got over to WA state naturally. They didn't float over on some driftwood.

That being said, the reaction has been, naturally, hyperbolic. It wouldn't be that horrible if we ended up with permanent colonies of them over here. Finding them is pretty easy, given their size.

They probably just caught a ride in some shipping container.

> “...took responsibility for the bioterrorist attack,[4] as financial retaliation for the environmental damage caused by the state's Malathion aerial spraying”.

Awkward— This paragraph is confusing, because it sounds like the complaint preceded the event that caused it.

Just last week I watched the 1993 movie Short Cuts, and learned about this event. Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon at it's best.

I just watched Short Cuts, too, so imagine my surprise reading your comment.

This will almost certainly NOT be done deliberately.

This is a common meme. It always turns out false or not proven (because it's false). See Tasmania and foxes.

It is an effective technique to harm the population, but since there is no terror it makes for crappy terrorism.

You'd need an informed public for this to work.

The article wasn’t clear to me on cause and effect. Did the group really release medflies in response to spraying to contain them? Resulting in more spraying, for a few months at least? Sounds odd.

Sterile male flies were released to reduce successful matings of queens.

That sounds like the solution that was partaken to resolve the problem?

They aren't spraying to kill the sterile flies.

“The Breeders”

That's where that band got their name from!

I thought that it's from a derogatory term for heterosexuals.

Some of the most evil people on this planet are “good people” who believe the ends justify the means.

I note they never caught them.

Here is a scum bag ostensibly protesting an aerial pest control program that was caught......

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&object...

....but read to the end to see the real reasons.

> Some of the most evil people on this planet are “good people” who believe the ends justify the means.

Are you talking about the people who were spraying Malathion?

No, the eco terrorists.

So, the people indiscriminately mass-spraying a dangerous chemical that they don't even understand into the environment? I'm not sure I'd go as far as to call that terrorism, but I see why other people would. They do seem to be convinced that the ends justify the means, and care little for collateral damage.

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