On Tue, Sep 25, 2018 at 12:08:10PM -0400, John Clark wrote: > > 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. >
It's not morality, but the precautionary principle in action. It's one thing to show this works within a lab. But causing the extinction of a species in an ecosystem can cause an avalanche of knockon effects, which generally speaking, cannot be tested for in the lab. I would be in favour of a moratorium until such time as the ecosystem is studied in detail, and detailed simulation models of the ecosystem run. Let's not go into this blind as so often we've done before - eg the story of the release of the rabbit calixi virus in Australia. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Senior Research Fellow [email protected] Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
