4 ms·
There is no evidence of harm yet. There are only a few mosquitoes with a bit more junk-DNA.
by bayesian_horse 7y ago
There is no evidence of harm yet. There are only a few mosquitoes with a bit more junk-DNA.
- danShumway 7y agoIt's not about evidence of harm, its about evidence that the safeguard didn't work. Imagine I was demoing an elevator with a backup stopping mechanism that kept it from going into free fall. So I hoist the elevator 10 feet up and cut the line, and the mechanism doesn't work, it falls immediately to the ground. Would it be reasonable for me to say, "Nobody was hurt, the elevator only dropped 10 feet, so there's no real problem"? I would want the elevator sent back to design/engineering before I was willing to put any people on it. The mosquitoes were not supposed to be able to breed, and they did. Not being able to breed was the safety valve. In this case, because the modifications were very minor, the effects of that are pretty minor, just a tiny bit of junk DNA. Because the rollout was small, the effects are small. I only hoisted the elevator 10 feet. But before we doing larger rollouts or more sophisticated modifications, we should make sure that our safety valves actually work. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that we collectively prove we can get small things right before we start doing large things.