The Gene Drive Dilemma: We Can Alter Entire Species, but Should We? – The New York Times

This mattered, James explained, because it allowed you to change not just a single creature but potentially an entire population, and quickly. A few months after the technique was discovered in 2014, James engineered two mosquitoes to carry a gene drive that was tied to a gene for red fluorescent color that would target the mosquitoes eyes. He then put each into a box with 30 ordinary purple-eyed mosquitoes. As the mosquitoes bred, they produced offspring: roughly 3,900 after two generations. (Mosquitoes lay a lot of eggs.) Under the normal rules of inheritance, there should have been an equal number of red-eyed and purple-eyed mosquitoes. Instead, when James opened the boxes to check on the offspring, all but 25 of the 3,900 mosquitoes had red eyes.

Leigh Dana Jackson, a producer who was adapting a fantasy novel called The Fifth Season for television, was one of the people who saw James s talk. I was fascinated by the fact that this was already real, he told me. It wasn t hard to imagine the Hollywood version of the gene-drive story: the rogue scientist determined to destroy global agriculture by breeding an unstoppable army of insects (working title: The Plague ); the corrupt corporate titan who, warned that gene drives can mutate wildly, silences the researcher, determined to see a return on his investment.

via www.nytimes.com

Get rid of ticks. They’re disgusting. Mosquitoes probably as well. But you’d have a lot more people then. Decisions, decisions.