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>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.

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