Excellent review! I started researching this topic myself a few weeks ago, with the intention of writing an overview like this one—you beat me to it :)
Based on my current reading of the literature, I tend to think that opting for total eradication of mosquito-borne disease vectors (i.e. certain species of mosquito) via CRISPR gene drives seems like the most promising approach.
I also came to the conclusion that accelerating the translation of gene drive technology from research to implementation should be a top priority for the EA community right now. I have little doubt that we will see implementation of these technologies eventually, but the potentially unwarranted delay to implementation could have severe consequences.
Counterarguments to swift implementation seem rather weak and suffer from an enormous status-quo bias. The current death toll of Malaria alone exceeds 500.000 people per year. If this would be a novel threat (global terrorism, emerging pandemia), nobody would think for a second that the vague negative consequences of losing Anopheles spp. as pollinators would outweigh the benefits. These are precisely those kinds of biases that EA reasoning and advocacy could help overcome.
What is especially scary is how open-ended the potential debates causing delay are. How long would it take to conduct research to prove or disprove that eradicating Anopheles spp. has negative ecological consequences that outweigh the utility of eradicating malaria? Who decides what these criteria are? How should a committee that decides on the implementation of CRISPR look like, since the effects of implementation are bound to cross borders and the technology is without precedent?
I am afraid that implementation might be severely delayed by waiting for committees deciding on which committees are responsible. This is a terrible situation, when each single day of delay causes 1.400 avoidable deaths from malaria alone. I think the EA community has all the right expertise, arguments and—increasingly—the connections to help avoid such a tragedy.
It seems like these committees are currently forming. We should devise strategies for influencing them in the most positive and effective way we can.
Excellent review! I started researching this topic myself a few weeks ago, with the intention of writing an overview like this one—you beat me to it :)
Based on my current reading of the literature, I tend to think that opting for total eradication of mosquito-borne disease vectors (i.e. certain species of mosquito) via CRISPR gene drives seems like the most promising approach.
I also came to the conclusion that accelerating the translation of gene drive technology from research to implementation should be a top priority for the EA community right now. I have little doubt that we will see implementation of these technologies eventually, but the potentially unwarranted delay to implementation could have severe consequences.
Counterarguments to swift implementation seem rather weak and suffer from an enormous status-quo bias. The current death toll of Malaria alone exceeds 500.000 people per year. If this would be a novel threat (global terrorism, emerging pandemia), nobody would think for a second that the vague negative consequences of losing Anopheles spp. as pollinators would outweigh the benefits. These are precisely those kinds of biases that EA reasoning and advocacy could help overcome.
What is especially scary is how open-ended the potential debates causing delay are. How long would it take to conduct research to prove or disprove that eradicating Anopheles spp. has negative ecological consequences that outweigh the utility of eradicating malaria? Who decides what these criteria are? How should a committee that decides on the implementation of CRISPR look like, since the effects of implementation are bound to cross borders and the technology is without precedent?
I am afraid that implementation might be severely delayed by waiting for committees deciding on which committees are responsible. This is a terrible situation, when each single day of delay causes 1.400 avoidable deaths from malaria alone. I think the EA community has all the right expertise, arguments and—increasingly—the connections to help avoid such a tragedy.
It seems like these committees are currently forming. We should devise strategies for influencing them in the most positive and effective way we can.
By the way, let me know if you want to collaborate on driving this forward (I would be very interested!). I think next steps would be to
Make a more structured review of all the arguments for and against implementation
Identifying nascent communities and stakeholders that will be vital in deciding on implementation
Identifying methods for speeding up the process (research, advocacy)