Has this analysis been checked by any qualified biologists? I’m seeing a lot of uncited speculative claims here, and I don’t want to form a strong opinion on these things without subject matter experts weighing in.
(for the record, I am in favour of gene drive research, target malaria seems like a worthy org)
Kevin Esvelt is the person who invented gene drives, and I recognise a lot of these points as things he has said. Particularly I remember a lot of the episode of Rationally Speaking he did was about the offense-defence balance issue and his decision to publish the research (from the transcript):
Julia: Right. Was it in 2014 that you discovered the potential to use CRISPR to do better gene editing?
Kevin: It was in early 2013, but I confess we sat on it for quite some time in large part because I was concerned about the implications. ... So what I eventually came to conclude is that it seems a lot like gene drive is unusual within the space of biotechnology. ... I was tremendously excited at first, but then the next morning I woke up and thought, good God. In principle, an individual researcher in the lab could just do this, just decide, we’re going to engineer a whole wild species now. ... And so I spent quite some time thinking, well, what are the implications of this? And in particular, could it be misused? What if someone wanted to engineer an organism for malevolent purposes? What could we do about it? ... So, it’s slow because it takes generations to spread, it can never more than double; it’s obvious, if you sequence the genome, you can’t hide it. And it’s easily countered, that is, CRISPR allows us to cut pretty much any DNA sequence of our choice.
And what that means is: Any given gene drive system that someone else has built… I can take that, I can add additional instructions to it, telling CRISPR to cut the original version, I can engineer my version so it doesn’t cut itself. And mine will continue to spread through the wild species just as effectively as the first gene drive. But whenever mine encounters theirs, mine will cut it and replace it. … So you put all these together: it’s slow, it’s obvious, and it’s easily countered. It’s really hard to make an effective weapon out of something with those characteristics.
I’m not sure about 100% of the claims in this post though, e.g. I’m not sure it’s right that “around half of our DNA is currently made up of these gene-drive mutations.”
Has this analysis been checked by any qualified biologists? I’m seeing a lot of uncited speculative claims here, and I don’t want to form a strong opinion on these things without subject matter experts weighing in.
(for the record, I am in favour of gene drive research, target malaria seems like a worthy org)
Kevin Esvelt is the person who invented gene drives, and I recognise a lot of these points as things he has said. Particularly I remember a lot of the episode of Rationally Speaking he did was about the offense-defence balance issue and his decision to publish the research (from the transcript):
I’m not sure about 100% of the claims in this post though, e.g. I’m not sure it’s right that “around half of our DNA is currently made up of these gene-drive mutations.”