If you've been following biology news over the last few years, you might have heard of an interesting concept called a "gene drive." The idea behind it is to create a genetic allele that transmits itself to all offspring of a sexually reproducing organism.
In plain English, a gene drive lets one release an organism with a modified gene, and have that modified gene spread to the rest of the population.
In multiple trials, modern CRISPR-based gene drives has been shown high efficacy in spreading throughout populations of caged Anopheles mosquitoes and completely suppressing their reproduction. As Anophele is the only species of mosquito that transmits malaria, causing their extinction would basically eliminate malaria cases in humans, saving hundreds of thousands of lives per year. Similar gene drives targeted to other types of mosquitoes (Aedes, Culex, etc.) could also eliminate diseases such as dengue fever, Zika virus, and West Nile virus.
And this isn't just in theory either. Here's the paper for "population suppression" by targeting the double sex gene. Note the date. 2018.
Since then, roughly 3 million people, mostly children living in Africa, are dead. And this gene drive has even been tested in larger scale experiments confirming it works exactly as intended.
Considering the roughly ~600,000 people that die from malaria ever year, or1600 people a day, ~65 an hour, or very roughly a person a minute, you would think people would be moving fast to put this into action. Every single minute of delay is another person dead from a (now) preventable disease.
But there's no real plan to do anything soon, or even in this decade.
So why the wait?
Politics. The technology is there. But who exactly has the authority to say yes? is it the local village? The local government? The country's government? All the world's government? Everyone thinks everyone else has a veto point, and no one's YES is sufficient to ignore the others. Vetocracy at it's finest. And how exactly is one expected to get a yes? Consider Gabon, Niger, Burkina, Faso, Sudan, Ginea, Chad, and Mali. All of these countries have experienced political coups in the last three years. These are the exact countries that are most ravaged by malaria, and are not coincidentally without functioning institutions, rule of law, or anyway to ask for help.
No big institution, such as large university labs, are willing to take the first step, as they're extremely, extremely risk-adverse and want very, very explicit approval before starting. They’re want something that’s never going to happen.
And the people living in country’s that experience yearly coups can't give approval, no matter how pressing the problem is, or how badly the people there want their children to stop dying from malaria.
So how to cut the Gordian knot?
Well. The instructions to replicate the experiment are posted online with step by step instructions, equipment list included, making the all in cost less than ~25k.
So give someone whose read the paper a plane ticket to Africa and....?
Woah. Woah. Woah.
Hold your horses, you might reasonably interject.
Caution.
Slow down.
Letting someone unilaterally decide to make Anopheles extinct seems pretty extreme. (even if humanity accidentally does this all the time) What about the ecological impacts? The social impacts? Chesterton's fence! That seems pretty dicey, even if it is for a good cause and will save millions of people lives.
And while the environmental impact of anopheles extinction would (most likely) be pretty negligible, (as no living organism survives solely, or has the majority of their diet from eating Anopheles) caution does seems prudent.
Letting someone unilaterally decide to make Anopheles extinct is pretty reckless.
Solution
So, what would be an even better solution?
A silver bullet if you will?
What would you do if you could snap your fingers and just make it happen?
What if....
What if...
What if... you woke up one morning and…
Mosquitoes didn't transmit malaria to humans anymore?
And nothing else about the world had changed?
Look at this brand new paper, hot off the printing press.
A lab created a gene drive with two dual antiparasite genes with no significant fitness costs, that drove through the entire population, and led to at least +90% of all mosquitoes no longer transmitting the needed threshold of malaria to infect humans. And this was in a large scale trial with ~100,000 mosquitoes (per test batch).
It keeps the mosquitoes alive, so there are no ecological impacts.
It makes the vast majority of Anopheles no longer transmit malaria to humans.
It does the exact minimal amount to solve this problem, and not a single iota more.
And as we've previously established, someone with access to roughly 25k and a year of work could replicate this experiment, and thereby reduce malaria cases in Africa by around ~90%, with no drawbacks, or repercussions.
The clock ticks.
With each minute another mother loses her child.
So the question remains:
Why the wait?