By Gwynne Dyer
LONDON – Most powerful new technologies are double-edged. Cars are a vast improvement on horses as a means of transportation, but they also kill more than three thousand people a day and they are a major source of pollution.
So here comes another double-edged technology, and its edges are very sharp. Gene drives can spread an engineered mutation through an entire species with amazing speed, which means that you could, for example, make the breeds of mosquitoes that transmit the malaria parasite to human being immune to the parasite themselves. (You could also just wipe those species of mosquito out, but then a lot of birds and bats would starve.) ....This is a technology that can change the entire character of a wild species very quickly (or wipe it out) if just one individual that has been genetically altered in the lab accidentally escapes and breeds, because the mutation will be passed on to ALL its descendants, and all of theirs, ad infinitum.
And, of course, we are also talking about the possibility that people with evil intentions might take common, harmless insects and make them lethal to human beings......for the rest of the story @ THE JAPAN TIMES web site click this link
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