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Comment by reedf1 | Hacker News Reader

I encourage all to look up what a gene drive is - find replace all mentions of 'mosquito' with 'human'. This makes a nuclear bomb look positively provincial - all it would take is one disgruntled post-doc. Only by the grace of god...

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I just looked it up. The process involves modifying a fertilized egg or embryo to create a founder organism. The gene drive is designed to be inherited by more than 50% of the organism’s offspring and propagate through the population over successive generations. Because humans have fewer offspring and longer generation times compared to insects, it would take many generations and potentially hundreds of years for a gene drive introduced in a single human to spread widely through the population.

I apologies for my other reply - which was flagged - perhaps I was rude. You are wrong because there are ways to introduce a gene drive through pathogens - e.g. you introduce a self-generating CRISPR payload through a pathogen vector for which it is possible to completely saturate gen 0. Source: I worked in a leading biology lab, with biologists actually performing this research.

If you can get a pathogen vector to infect all of humanity you already have just about everything you need to cause massive damage; the gene drive doesn't make this situation appreciably worse.

(Speaking for myself, not SecureBio)

We are comparing guns and bullets. The fact that you can genetically engineer a pathogen vector to deliver a gene drive is not well known to the public.

We just recently had COVID which was likely bioengineered (as the lab leak is now "officially" considered a plausible explanation)

How could they make sure that the CRISPR payload survives replication?

Which replication? Of the virus or of gen 0?

But mosquitoes are super annoying, and the probably don't even know how to make nuclear bombs. I mean, lots of humans are annoying too, but not all of them. Every single mosquito is annoying, and they can't stop us, so, uhh.. let's do it.

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