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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what would happen if instead of releasing sterile male screwworms, we used the gene drive to release screwworms that could only have male descendants. I've heard of a similar idea to eradicate malaria by doing that to mosquitoes.

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It seems that the mosquito effort was not a success after all [0].

[0] https://m.dw.com/en/genetically-modified-mosquitoes-breed-in...

Different approach, that attempt was to reduce population sizes not cause extinction. Though it is evidence that Gene Drive is less likely to work than many expect.

Nature thwarts gene drives by modifying their targets, so it's important that whatever is being targeted can't easily change. Surviving instead of being killed off is certainly an evolutionary advantage, after all :-)

There's been some research on finding targets that can't be mutated. Here's one example: https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.4245

While that may be true for general use of the gene drive, doesn't this particular use significantly increase the fitness of the individual organisms (despite being harmful to the species as a whole), resulting in essentially no evolutionary pressure against it?

Evolution happens on all levels at the same time. So, while this is the most likely result, it's not impossible that things go in other ways.

Anyway, it's also very unlikely that those actions result in anything worse than resistance against those same actions in the future.

The article says they are working on it: “Biologists are also developing a genetically modified male-only strain of screwworms, which would require fewer flies to be raised and released.”

That seems like they would still be doing the same thing, except that the flies they would be able to release 100% male flies instead of 50/50 males and females

Why don't we start with the thing that we know works, and worry about CRISPR magic later?

We started this a long time ago. It is "later".

The article does mention that...

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