Thanks for sharing! This seems like good news, and I’m glad they’re looking at safety issues along so many different axes.
However, I’m a bit confused as to what interventions like this are meant/expected to accomplish. It seems like the long-term result of this kind of intervention would be a recovery of the mosquito population as the modified mosqs’ descendents got outcompeted by mosquitos without the genes.
Is the idea that mosquito populations are small enough (relative to the number of modified ones introduced) that they might be eradicated entirely, to lower populations temporarily during a high-disease-risk period, or to hopefully end up in an evolutionary equilibrium with fewer a. aegypti (e.g. if other mosquito species that carry less diseases can move in on their niche while the population is low)?
Hey! Just happened upon this article while searching for something else. Hope the necro isn’t minded.
I wanted to point out that since this article was written—and especially in the last year—basic income at least has become a lot more mainstream. There’s the (failed) Swiss referendum, and apparently Finland and YCombinator are both running basic income trials as well. (More locally, there’s of course the GiveDirectly UBI trial as well.)
Anecdotally, it seems like these events have also been accompanied by many more people (in my particular bubble) being familiar with the idea. Empirically, see below for a graph of [number of articles mentioning basic income] per year in the New York Times in the link below. EDIT: in an April survey “A majority of Europeans (58%) reported to have at least some familiarity with the concept of basic income, and 64% of Europeans said they would vote in favour of basic income.” Not sure about the US at large, though.
Obviously it’s debatable how well we could have foreseen this, but it might be worth thinking about a) to what degree we can predict(/affect) which “weird” idea will gain traction and b) to what extent (the possibility of) this sort of rapid increase in acceptability allows for some relaxation of the “weirdness points” framework.
NYT link. Note, too, the basic income “bubble” in the ~’70s. http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=%22basic%20income%22&format=count
Results from that April EU survey summarized here: http://www.basicincome.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/EU_Basic-Income-Poll_Results.pdf