[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.