Funded by a $100,000,000 grant from Bill Gates biologists have found a way to make a species of mosquitoes go extinct using CRISPR genetic engineering technology to connect a sterility gene to a Gene Driver:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.4245 Normally if you have a gene there is only a 50% chance one of your children will have it too, but with Gene Drive there is a 100% chance they will have that gene. There is a gene that makes female mosquitoes sterile and they hooked up that gene to a Gene Drive mechanism in a male mosquito. It would be illegal to release that mosquito into the wild but they found in the lab the gene was in 100% of the population in less than 11 generations making the entire population collapse. A generation in a mosquito is about 40 days. Mosquitoes carry many diseases, malaria alone killed 450,000 people last year and made many millions more very sick, nevertheless self styled guardians of morality are already calling for a moratorium on the use of this technology in the field and say we should wait decades before letting one of these insects go free if we ever do. If that's morality then I'm proud to be immoral. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
