How fast would gene drive mosquitoes spread? I estimate 1-10 miles per year. Of course, once you know it works, you can speed that up very cheaply by transporting mosquitoes. If someone surreptitiously released them once, in one place, and it worked, how long would it take to notice?
Your enthusiasm is laudable. However, comparable approaches have been around for decades and the limits are definitely political, not technical. For instance https://www.ox.ac.uk/research/research-impact/defeating-dengue-gm-mosquitoes recently finished a trial in Florida, but I don't see any path to regulatory approval or widespread use. What makes the gene drive mechanism different?
I agree – it's infuriating to see this technology that could save so many lives held up by ignorance and fear.
With gene drives, the potential benefit is much greater because they are self-propagating (unlike the Oxitec mosquitoes) so much fewer transgenic mosquitoes (thousands not billions) are required to cause complete eradication. This makes the technical challenges much smaller. It would actually be very hard to completely eradicate Anopheles mosquitoes using Oxitec-style technology.
I think the risks are underestimated here, this is a genie that can't be put back in the bottle. There is a low chance of a downside MUCH worse than the status quo of thousands of deaths per day. I would be more in favor if there were larger scale (biosphere tm) size trials and there was a way to 'undo the release'. Could you develop a gene-drive to return the og mosquitoes? Two other questions I have are... 1. Why don't / wont the things that got Malaria out of eg south US work in Africa.
2. I there a way to target the plasmodium rather than the mosquito?
Thanks, you can stop spraying ddt, and it will go away or at least there will stop being more of it. But once a swamp is drained, it's not coming back - at least without bringing the malaria back with it. And the collatoral ecological damage is immense.
It seems like it's doable by a rogue individual with a basement lab preferably where there are many natural mosquitoes and the dedication to spend their own money to try it but if I were a molecular biology graduate, I would certainly at least think about it. When the barriers are political and not technical in a big problem like this I become very frustrated.
How fast would gene drive mosquitoes spread? I estimate 1-10 miles per year. Of course, once you know it works, you can speed that up very cheaply by transporting mosquitoes. If someone surreptitiously released them once, in one place, and it worked, how long would it take to notice?
Your enthusiasm is laudable. However, comparable approaches have been around for decades and the limits are definitely political, not technical. For instance https://www.ox.ac.uk/research/research-impact/defeating-dengue-gm-mosquitoes recently finished a trial in Florida, but I don't see any path to regulatory approval or widespread use. What makes the gene drive mechanism different?
I agree – it's infuriating to see this technology that could save so many lives held up by ignorance and fear.
With gene drives, the potential benefit is much greater because they are self-propagating (unlike the Oxitec mosquitoes) so much fewer transgenic mosquitoes (thousands not billions) are required to cause complete eradication. This makes the technical challenges much smaller. It would actually be very hard to completely eradicate Anopheles mosquitoes using Oxitec-style technology.
I think the risks are underestimated here, this is a genie that can't be put back in the bottle. There is a low chance of a downside MUCH worse than the status quo of thousands of deaths per day. I would be more in favor if there were larger scale (biosphere tm) size trials and there was a way to 'undo the release'. Could you develop a gene-drive to return the og mosquitoes? Two other questions I have are... 1. Why don't / wont the things that got Malaria out of eg south US work in Africa.
2. I there a way to target the plasmodium rather than the mosquito?
0. Yes actually, the gene drive can be reversed by a counter-drive. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9240394/
1. DDT and draining swamps got malaria out of the southern US; this would cause more ecological damage than gene drives.
2. Maybe! Plasmodium does have a sexual stage, although it largely reproduces asexually. I haven't looked into this deeply though.
Thanks, you can stop spraying ddt, and it will go away or at least there will stop being more of it. But once a swamp is drained, it's not coming back - at least without bringing the malaria back with it. And the collatoral ecological damage is immense.
>you can stop spraying ddt, and it will go away
. . . after multiple decades. It's classified as a persistent organic pollutant.
Yeah but not a reproducing pollutant, that is the core of my fear with this tech.
It seems like it's doable by a rogue individual with a basement lab preferably where there are many natural mosquitoes and the dedication to spend their own money to try it but if I were a molecular biology graduate, I would certainly at least think about it. When the barriers are political and not technical in a big problem like this I become very frustrated.