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Comment by Fwirt | Hacker News Reader

Whenever this comes up I always find it interesting that nobody comments on the now 60-year ongoing program that eradicated the screwworm fly from the US by doing pretty much the same thing: releasing millions of genetically altered (sterilized by radiation!) screwworms that mate with the native population. I have no comment on the positive or negative outcomes of the environmental modifications that both programs cause, just that it's interesting that there's so much visible backlash against the mosquito program while nobody mentions the screwworm one.

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I briefly worked in a leading Biology lab as an undergrad - and this sort of work came up. Genetic modification considered alone is not scary. Gene drives designed for sterilization on the other hand - are.

I was given a long explanation about how gene drives worked and was filled with mild existential terror at how easy it would be to replace "mosquito" with "human". I knew many biologists capable of performing these procedures. It would only take one disgruntled post-doc to really cause humanity existential damage.

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

One post-doc could release 750 million genetically altered humans and we'd be doomed.

I think @reedf1 is talking about the long term damage to a population.

With the gene drive technology, the modified gene is always inherited.

the 750 million number is there to speed up the process.

(This my understanding from reading the first few paragraphs from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_drive)

Being always inherited, in humans, is no danger at all. Someone can develop a deactivation shot before the first generation to inherit the gene hits puberty.

And then sell it, so only the wealthy can reproduce!

Why do I get the sinking feeling that this will be commercialized "first as tragedy, then as farce"

I have to admit I don't really see the plan here.

Mad geneticist injects 1000 people with a gene.

50 years later, 7500 people have to pay for the fix! The profits!

And that's ignoring the failure rate of the initial shot.

This is a worse return on investment than a maniacal scheme to infect people directly, and then 1:1 charge them for a cure.

How exactly would they inherit the genes if it causes sterility?

Sterility for only 1 sex type maybe?

Sterility is just one example of gene modification.

A harmful modification that doesn't cause sterility will propagate across generations if the indivuals are able to reproduce.

For example a scenario where we see the symptoms but we don't know that they are caused by a gene modification. And where individuals are still able to live and have children.

And I'm not saying that the tech is bad. I'm sure that people can come up with a lot of good use cases.

That's not how evolution works.

If it's harmful, it will get selected against, and will disappear rather rapidly.

There's a reason why they need to release 750 million genetically modified mosquitos, and not just 1.

Well i’d say the inability to understand probability is a harmful trait but you’re clearly still here and might even have kids. And everyone with asthma, type 1 diabetes, and a tiny dick would like a word with you. Idiot

I'm sorry, it must be tough having those three conditions, but unfortunately that has little to do with what we're discussing.

With 6 billion people in the world today, even if our nefarious post-doc somehow gene-spliced 100 people with a 100% probability transmit of a "bad" recessive gene, it would take so many generations for any effect to be felt.

By then, we can assume, it would be trivial to reverse the "damage" caused. Hence the eye-rolling at the idea that one post-doc could be any serious threat.

Does evolution in that manner really apply to humans anymore? I'm basically blind without glasses and I still get to have kids, probably would have died as a useless child in caveman days Edit: I'm downvoted but I'm curious why. It seems to me that modern medicine has eliminated large parts of natural selection for humans. Is that not the case?

Presumably your mental abilities have compensated for your physical issues, thus increasing your fitness. That's valid evolutionary logic as well.

I think it's about that the natural selection applies only to the current environment. We are not to be fit to live in caveman days, but in the modern society. If having a condition does not present an obstacle to navigate the world and mate, then it won't be selected against.

evolution and rapidly don't go together.

Rapidly in evolutionary terms.

I think the idea with gene drive is the offspring are sterile so if you went with one of the genetically modified guys you'd get kids but not grandkids.

You could always have a tick box for it on the Tinder profile.

Ready for your corona shot?

While gene drives are scary powerful tech (note, the featured article is not a gene drive), I don't think it would really be a problem humanity wise. We breed a lot slower, so we'd have decades to notice and deal with a problem. And we can apply all sorts of solutions that mosquitos are not capable of.

Perhaps I am being naive (I’m certainly ignorant enough to be), but I don’t see why we should be worried about gene drives in humans — surely we can, in principle, genetically modify ourselves to fix the problem gene drives would cause?

For example, there was a story in the UK press (it may be fictional, but I think it will still serve the argument) that there is a gene which causes extremely strong male-directed sexual attraction in both men and women [0] — all men with it are gay, all women with it are hyperfertile, and the hyperfertility is strong enough that positive evolutionary pressure from the women counterbalances the negative pressure from the men.

I think that this sort of thing could count as a toy model of gene-drive, but do correct me if I’m misusing terms or generally failing to understand.

But, even in this toy example probably based on a journalist failing to understand the science, we can not only genetically modify ourselves, but also we have in-vitro fertilisation so we don’t even need to GM ourselves.

[0] don’t worry, I’m bi, this isn’t a hopeless pearl-clutching story about gay genes

> surely we can, in principle, genetically modify ourselves to fix the problem gene drives would cause?

It might not be practically possible. Genetic modification has side effects, where typos are introduced in other areas than the target.

This means that the first generation of a hypothetical new gene drive is less likely to survive long. But once the gene drive got established subsequent generations would become more and more normal (as typos were lost by interbreeding and natural selection).

Now imagine that we discover a rogue gene drive introduced in humans after, say, it has affected 1000 individuals. There isn't any way of ethically fixing it in their children. You can't go to a person and tell them that they are not allowed to have children. Nor can you tell them that they need to undergo an experiment that makes their children 100x more likely to die young, for example.

"I was given a long explanation about how gene drives worked and was filled with mild existential terror at how easy it would be to replace "mosquito" with "human"."

You're right of course, and unfortunately sooner or later what you say will come to pass (tragically, I see it as inevitable).

My take is slightly different: as the technology is here now, and given that we cannot stop it (certainly not in the long term - as eventually the tech will get so easy that it'll done in backyard sheds), then it's better to run with something like this mosquito eradication which hopefully may do some good.

With luck - and we'll need lots of it - intelligent regulation may follow. Ban it outright and it'll definitely go underground. Backyard sheds will then become labs that are centers of research. Heaven knows where that would lead us.

When this happens for humans, I predict that we would also see parallel development of tests which ensure that a potential mate does not have gene drives in their genome.

You have now re-invented the TV series "Island City" from 1994.

Stargate had a set of episodes that was roughly near this topic too. It was one of my faves.

How would you do it in humans though? Can you “modify” existing individuals’ genome without their consent or noticing? Asking because I know close to nothing on the subject.

It would only really work in a population that doesn't have genetic testing, which we do. And it would be very slow because humans take approximately 20 years to start producing the next generation.

Wouldn't this be a problem that would not surface in our lifetime if it affects future births and the professor wouldn't be around to see the end result?

It hasn’t come up often, but it’s certainly not true that it doesn’t come up at all.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Thanks for that hn.algolia.com search link; scanned it and found this gem that summarizes the screwworms story concisely:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23377636

Tangentially related: "The Screwfly Solution" by Raccoona Sheldon is a fantastic (but pretty dark) short story.

I couldn't not look up "Racoona Sheldon" and found:

Alice Bradley Sheldon (August 24, 1915 – May 19, 1987) was an American science fiction author better known as James Tiptree Jr., a pen name she used from 1967 to her death. It was not publicly known until 1977 that James Tiptree Jr. was a woman. From 1974 to 1977 she also used the pen name Raccoona Sheldon. Sheldon was inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2012.[2]

Wow, what a bio. 1941: Chicago Sun art critic. WW2: WAAC major. 1952-55 CIA. 1967 PhD from GWU in experimental psychology.

I was not aware of this.

For those who are unfamiliar with the screwworm program:

https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/ourfocus/internationalservi...

I wonder what the trade-offs are for genetic engineering vs radiation sterilization for the mosquito situation.

"The sterile insect technique was proposed by scientists Edward F. Knipling and Raymond C. Bushland, and was rapidly adopted by the United States Department of Agriculture in 1958. The technique centers on a unique reproductive handicap that prevents female C. hominivorax flies from mating more than once."

From wikipedia.

So, probably not effective for mosquitos.

Isn't there a difference between sterilization, and genetic intervention, on potential unknowns? I am not saying that the first one was entirely safe, but explicit gene editing seems to be much more risky than sterilizing.

Sterilized by radiation sounds much more risky to me. You don't know what else was changed by the radiation. With gene editing at least you know what you changed.

If you sterilize an animal it doesn't reproduce. These insects only don't reproduce well.

How would you check millions of insects for actually being sterile? Considering it cost 100M$, I assume they established a non-lethal dose of radiation and then just blasted the insects. Could easily be that one develops beneficial mutations.

I'm imagining a lab where how effectively mosquitos are humping in measured after blasting their naughty bits with radiation. That is amazing.

"What do you do for a living?"

"Have you ever heard of PornHub? Well, I'm a contributor to MosquitoHub. It sucks less and less everyday!"

Not to sound condescending but I think we have yet to observe radiation leading to useful mutation. Radiation does not lead to 'mutation' in the sense of what you are implying. Rather it leads to DNA damages (breakage of chemical bonds) which usually leads to cancer.

Radiation increases mutation rates. Natural mutations occur through not vastly different mechanisms either.

In case you think no positive mutations come out of it; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_breeding

We literally blasted plants with radiation and then bred the ones that looked like they had some positive mutations.

Especially the list of notable results is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_breeding#Notable_muta...

You are definitely right, but I probably should have specified. Irradiating seeds is vastly different than irradiating already living specimen, and hardly transferable to insects I believe.

Irradiating the entire specimen is not so different if you also irradiate the part of them that produces the seed. You're just irradiating an earlier stage of reproduction, the result is unlikely to be different. Seeds have the advantage that they do not move and contain little water that could interfere with the radiation. The insect will produce it's own seed once irradiated, infertile or not.

It's been tried.

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

"The practice of plant irradiation has resulted in the development of over 2000 new varieties of plants, most of which are now used in agricultural production"