[sudhirj]

Might help to remember that random DNA changes occur every single time sexual reproduction occurs, so trillions of times a day (across all animals). The gene drive is a way of selection and replication, don't think it causes something to occur that did not already have a non-zero chance of happening.

[ForHackernews]

Gene drive is more risky than regular normal mutations because the allele will be inherited by all offspring.

[sudhirj]

But even the mutation that causes the allele to be inherited by all offspring is possible naturally, right? Isn’t that the same as the fragments that cause all human offspring to have two eyes?

Or does this drive have an anti-mutation mutation built in? The article seems to indicate that this is a particularly devious set of changes that will cause offspring to either have the changes wanted, or die.

[ForHackernews]

You can read up on gene drive, but the short version is that it's a devious genetic-engineering trick so that if even one copy of the allele is present, all offspring will get it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_drive#/media/File:Gene_Dr...

The allele will replicate itself onto the homologous chromosome. Another way to think of it is that an allele from a gene-drive parent will wipe out and copy itself over the allele from the other parent.

It'd be like if instead of the only the phenotypic expression of brown eyes being dominant over blue eyes, rather the brown gene actually wiped out the blue gene so no blue-eyed children could be born from a pairing of one brown-eyed and one blue-eyed parent.