The headline is clearly meant to give laypeople the impression that it makes permanent changes to pest (and presumably human) consumers, so I think it does need

The headline is clearly meant to give laypeople the impression that it makes permanent changes to pest (and presumably human) consumers, so I think it does need to be pushed back against. You're also assuming humans have homology to the RNA being used here, which they don't. You can find the paper describing it here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8650841/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8650841/ I BLASTed the sequence against the human genome and it found no hits at all, so it's not clear to me how this would have any effect on us. You can see the results here for the next two days: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?CMD=Get&RID=KE1GENDM013 https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?CMD=Get&RID=KE1GEND...