[bloppe]

My understanding (very informal armchair) is that someone could relatively easily wipe out aedes aegypti using a gene drive with a sort of sex-selective infertility:

Release a few thousand females carrying a gene drive that produces all infertile males, and all fertile females (who all also have the same gene due to it being a gene drive). Every generation, there are more and more infertile males, and more and more fertile females carrying this extinction gene. After several generations (a.k.a. a few years), the population collapses completely.

I vote yes.

[unholiness]

Gene drives are such amazing and such frightening technology. No one puts them in the same conversation as nukes or engineered pandemics, but they share the same pattern of "technology improvements giving smaller and smaller actors globally reaching powers", and have even more potential for consequences not intended by those actors. It's pretty scary to imagine a world where one lab or one rich farmer has the power to (after a few dozen generations) globally make arbitrary edits the DNA of entire species. Even smart and goodhearted people can screw up that world.

So from this armchair, I'm glad to see that at least for aedes aegypti (which seems like the clearest case for deploying a gene drive), there's an alternative like debug.

[marcosdumay]

You'd want fertile males and infertile females (it's different from the idea on the article), so you could contaminate the population faster.

But any claim of completely wiping out a thriving species with a single action is doubtful. I'm all for trying this one, but I'm not bullish on its long-term success.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

I'm hoping that at some point someone just disregards all the "safety" debate, does it, and succeeds. There is something deeply upsetting about being in the position humanity is on earth and still being expected to tolerate being eaten alive.

I wonder why we don't just try it on some remote island that has had mosquitoes introduced to it, but is otherwise considered isolated from the rest of the ecosystem (at least as far as mosquitoes are concerned).

[mrhottakes]

There's a great novel about that idea called Jurassic Park. Long story short, it turned out just fine.