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I have a secret plan of once I have >$10mm in free cash, doing gene drive elimination of the disease vector mosquitoes without getting any permission or notific
by rdl 9y ago
I have a secret plan of once I have >$10mm in free cash, doing gene drive elimination of the disease vector mosquitoes without getting any permission or notification by any states. I’m not sure if someone else will beat me to it, but I’d be perfectly happy to stand before the UN or whatever after having done it.
- fao_ 9y agoIt's not very secret anymore :P
- k_sh 9y agoAll that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- eranation 9y agoI think you'll be surprised by the lack of retaliation and even cheers you'll get around. No one likes mosquitoes. And I think I read somewhere (and I'm too tired to google it) that ecologists believe there will be little to no harm to the ecosystem if they will just one day poof away from the face of the earth. Even animal rights organizations will meh over it.
- mainliningfbs 9y agoYou are joking, right?
- zackbloom 9y agoNo, this is the common understanding.
- coltonv 9y agoNo genuine scientific conclusion confirms this. It's a hypothesis and one we have no way of testing, but people think it sounds awesome so they spread it without a good understating.
- rdl 9y agoWe definitely don’t know for sure, but we absolutely know the harm caused by malaria and dengue. (I personally care about this from living in places with both, and because Elon Musk almost died from dengue, apparently.)
- macawfish 9y agoEveryone almost died of a lot of things. We're all lucky to be alive. For people in countries with Malaria, its like the flu. In fact, flu also kills a lot of people. What's the solution to diseases? Improving peoples' general health and wellbeing, so that their immune systems can handle the disease. The solution is not to eradicate an entire species in the middle of an already distraught global ecological catastrophe. For every instance of a mosquito causing a malarial infection, there are likely uncountable instances of mosquitoes causing inoculation.
- goatlover 9y agoI have a hard time believing mosquitos aren't a significant food source for something. What takes their place? And anyway, why would we need to make them extinct everywhere, and not just places people live?
- kalms 9y agoMosquitoes are a large food source for birds, especially migratory birds in the northern regions. Eliminating them would be devastating to Scandinavia's biodiversity.
- Turing_Machine 9y ago"there will be little to no harm to the ecosystem if they will just one day poof away from the face of the earth" Well, perhaps not if the specific species that carry the diseases vanish. Eliminating all mosquitoes would almost certainly have an effect. Of course, that's one reason why gene drives are so attractive -- you can target individual species, rather than indiscriminately killing every insect in the area.
- bdamm 9y agoWouldn't other mosquito species start becoming vectors though? It's not like the niche the vector is occupying goes away.
- IanCal 9y agoI expect that would depend on why only certain species can transmit human malaria. Yes if the reason is purely regional, but if there's something else (length of lifecycle, presence or absence of certain enzymes, ability to take blood from human) then there would have to be incredibly fast adaptation for malaria to survive. The parasites don't survive equally well even within the species they inhabit. https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/biology/mosquitoes/ https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/biology/mosquitoes/
- greenburger 9y agoProbably not. Humans have eliminated many species and the niches they occupied haven't been always been filled by other species. Megafauna on many continents is a good example.
- logfromblammo 9y agoThe thing that makes Aedes aegypti such a good vector is its tendency to feed on multiple humans. They get spooked and fly off from a feeding site, then land again to try again, and the subsequent bites might not be on the same human. So one infected mosquito can vector a disease to an entire room of people if there is enough activity to make them attempt that many bites. Many other mosquitoes will just stick it out and hope you don't notice them before they fill up. They either succeed in one bite or get squashed. Those mosquitoes have less opportunity to acquire a disease from an infected human, and less opportunity to transmit one to an uninfected human. And if there is no mechanism for that vector to pass to a mosquito's offspring, the one-bite behavior means there is no transmission between humans at all.
- djsumdog 9y agoFrom some of the papers I've read, the necessary tech seems to be way cheaper; like <$50k USD. That's the truly frightening thing. Once scientist even wanted to make home CRISPR kits available so individuals could study the effects on bacteria and yeast: https://newatlas.com/home-crispr-gene-editing-kit/40362/ https://newatlas.com/home-crispr-gene-editing-kit/40362/
- blacksmith_tb 9y agoToo late: http://www.the-odin.com/diy-crispr-kit/ http://www.the-odin.com/diy-crispr-kit/
- taneq 9y agoSo were basically at the point now with genetic engineering that we were at with nuclear weapons in The Sum of All Fears. It still amazes me that no-one's built a successful non-state-aligned nuclear weapon yet.
- tzahola 9y agoThe blueprints are out there, it’s the weapons-grade fissile material that’s hard to come by ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- littlestymaar 9y agoFortunately the weapons-grade biological material is hard to come too. Oh, wait …
- sewer_bird 9y agoReminds me of this Guardian article investigating such a plan to combat Zika, Dengue, and so on: https://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/feb/10/should-we-wipe-mosquitoes-off-the-face-of-the-earth https://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/feb/10/should-we-wip...
- erikpukinskis 9y agoBuy real estate futures in malaria prone areas first you’ll be rich.
- pc86 9y agoWell if he's already got over $10 million...
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y agoIf you did it, you should receive the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
- colordrops 9y agoHow are you so sure that disease vector mosquitos don't play an important role in the ecosystem? I would posit that predicting ecosystem outcomes is no easier than predicting weather.
- unmole 9y agoOnly a handful of mosquito species transmit human diseases. Other non-harmful species can fill their ecological niche.
- colordrops 9y agoDo you know what connections those handful of mosquitos have to various aspects of the ecosystem other than transmitting human diseases?
- trhway 9y ago>Other non-harmful species can fill their ecological niche. do you mean the niche of malaria transmitter? I suppose it wouldn't be that hard for another species of mosquito to become a transmitter. Anyway, out of curiosity i once spent some time correlating genetically modified mosquito releases with the modern Zika outbreaks (there weren't Zika outbreaks before 2007 according to WHO, only like 14 separate cases) - the Zika outbreaks started in 2007 and for the most of them it was possible to find information that there were a release of those mosquito in the area of the outbreak 1-3 years before the outbreak (in the case of Gabon 2007 outbreak it was those mosquito development and testing in previous years on an island off the cost of Gabon. Another 2007 outbreak - Yap island - also seems being a testing ground in the years leading to the outbreak).
- rdl 9y agoI don’t care. Malaria and dengue are sufficiently bad that I’d take the risk. This has been studied, though. No animal only eats mosquitoes, and I’d only start with a few species (but likely expand to all of them.)
- senand 9y ago
- blackhatbiodude 9y agoI think you could even incentivize this via the blockchain... some kind of black hat x prize for doing stuff like this. You create an ethereum contract that people can donate to, and the balance gets distributed to someone to posts a blockchain account linked to the gene drive genetic sequence. The contract pays out once some scientists publish a paper showing someone did it and publishing the matching gene drive code from the wild.
- rando444 9y agoThe law of unintended consequences says you'll end up killing off mosquitoes, related insects and thing that feed on them like birds and small reptiles.. slowly eliminating large portions of the food chain.
- red75prime 9y agoUntil it reaches new stable equilibrium, becomes new status quo and get protected from introduction of invasive species.
- jackaroe78 9y agoEradicate wasps while you're at it (thx in advance)
- ivl 9y agoTicks too, please?
- sliverstorm 9y agoWhy not a gene drive on the disease itself?
- thriftwy 9y agoMosquitoes are bad enough even without any diseases. They greatly reduce potential life quality of huge amount of land.
- sliverstorm 9y agoSo it's not about the disease after all eh? Pick and choose species that annoy us?
- thriftwy 9y agoThat's about it. You know who also annoy me? Roaches. Do you suggest searching for a peace threaty with them?
- tomaskafka 9y agoRead this story first, please: https://www.quora.com/If-mosquitoes-were-in-danger-of-extinction-would-we-try-to-protect-them-or-try-to-get-them-extinct/answer/Jay-Bazzinotti https://www.quora.com/If-mosquitoes-were-in-danger-of-extinc... > Within a month we destroyed the mosquito population. We could actually go outside in short sleeves again. We were very, very happy. > It didn’t take long to notice the change in the ecology, however. Being in a rural area we had a large amount of diverse animals and birds. When the mosquitoes went, all the birds went too. Not a few birds, not just the song birds, but all the birds. We created our own “silent spring”. The bats and dragonflies also went away and with them many of the fish in the lake became more voracious and desperate to eat, which meant that they were much easier to catch. In a short time the lake was fished out. And because all the birds were gone we got a tick explosion. Instead of mosquitoes we now have ticks everywhere. It’s annoying to be constantly pulling off ticks, checking for ticks and finding ticks attached to one’s genitals. In addition, there have been a number of cases of Lyme disease as a result. ... > The Law of Unintended Consequences is a very powerful law. You may be attempting to do something good over here but the result is an unforeseen and negative change in the infrastructure over there. It’s funny now how we get together outside and notice how dead we’ve made the area by killing all the mosquitoes. It looks beautiful, just like the environment looks OK in Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”, beautiful to look at, but devoid of life, devoid of sound and requiring constant laundry, showering and tick checks. It’s extremely disheartening to come into the house and finding a tick attached to your genitals. And although we cannot attribute it to our killing of the mosquitoes, the leech population has exploded in the lake as well. Maybe the loss of all the fish that ate the mosquitoes and leeches allowed the explosion of the leech population.
- thriftwy 9y agoCan we figure out to replace mosquitoes in some fashion that doesn't feature human as an essential part of food chain? "You literally had to run from your car to the house" isn't how you would like to live for the entirety of your life. Of course I don't have high hopes for Californians to understand this. Tbe bottom line of the article is: > I’m not going to kid you. It’s excellent now that the mosquitoes are gone. We don’t regret making that big effort.
- XFrequentist 9y agoIt's a noble plan, but have you considered the harm you could do to scientific progress - if such a plot were discovered, the negative publicity could set back gene drive science by decades. The potential benefits of gene drives are so vast that (to me) this overwhelms other concerns (yes, even if you successfully eliminated all mosquito borne diseases). I'd love to see (biting) mosquitos eradicated, but I've come to believe that the slow process of an "official" eradication program is ultimately superior (despite finding the humanitarian toll of delay sickening). Happy to elaborate if it might help you think things through.