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They're not talking about ALL mosquitoes. Just the ones that carry the malaria disease. There will be plenty of mosquitoes types left to keep us all scratching and the bats happy.
So long as nobody's starving from fish not having as much prey to eat, if we kill off the malaria-carriers we're basically stopping 600,000 people per year from having a bomb dropped on them. I haven't looked at all the consequences, but that's sounding pretty good to me.
The worst is malaria, which kills more than 600,000 people every year; another 200 million cases incapacitate people for days at a time. It threatens half of the world’s population and causes billions of dollars in lost productivity annually. Other mosquito-borne diseases include dengue fever, yellow fever, and encephalitis.
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Support for this sort of technology, is a failure of intelligence -worst case scenarios should hold much more weight than expert assurances.
Why so much fear? Why not place that fear on the now. There's plenty of things to fear now, things we might not fear in the future due to our "playing god."
Not eventually delving into gene editing would be a terrible waste. We're already born with a terrible, decaying disease called aging that mandates that our bodies break down over time.
It's just a matter of how long we should wait until it's safe...and this seems pretty safe to me. I think think of many consequences it might have that would be likely to outweigh the lack of 600,000 people pear year dying.
I very strongly feel we should seek to spread a philosophy that tells people it's good to "play god" so long as you have plenty of practice and forethought. Mother nature is our enemy, so far as I'm concerned. We should be trying to rid ourselves of her influence, and re-shape the world into something better. The only question is how long, and how careful, to be about engaging in that.
But people have desperate problems right now. We're definitely going to require genetically modified foods, more than we already do, in the future. Genetic modification is a wonderful thing.
But there are certainly risks. CRISPR technology could enable almost anyone to genetically engineer things, letting them potentially build diseases in their basements. Broader genetic engineering knowledge could extend such hazards....
But the alternative to not "playing god" is unacceptable, so far as I can see. We won't be able to feed our rising population without it, and given that mosquitoes are already a major danger to humans, particularly through spreading the sorts of diseases that might be a major problem of genetic engineering in the future anyway...I'm going to be fine with mosquito genocide, unless someone can think of a really, really good reason to avoid it, one that outweighs the deaths of 600,000 people per year that occur from malaria now.
Some in NZ want to try a similar thing on rats who have ravaged the local ground bird species.
This can go very very bad.
I'm not really worried about that either. I can't think of a huge amount of stuff that would likely go wrong, and nothing that would outweigh the benefits i can think of.
Why so much fear? Why not place that fear on the now. There's plenty of things to fear now, things we might not fear in the future due to our "playing god."
Not eventually delving into gene editing would be a terrible waste. We're already born with a terrible, decaying disease called aging that mandates that our bodies break down over time.
It's just a matter of how long we should wait until it's safe...and this seems pretty safe to me. I think think of many consequences it might have that would be likely to outweigh the lack of 600,000 people pear year dying.
I very strongly feel we should seek to spread a philosophy that tells people it's good to "play god" so long as you have plenty of practice and forethought. Mother nature is our enemy, so far as I'm concerned. We should be trying to rid ourselves of her influence, and re-shape the world into something better. The only question is how long, and how careful, to be about engaging in that.
But people have desperate problems right now. We're definitely going to require genetically modified foods, more than we already do, in the future. Genetic modification is a wonderful thing.
But there are certainly risks. CRISPR technology could enable almost anyone to genetically engineer things, letting them potentially build diseases in their basements. Broader genetic engineering knowledge could extend such hazards....
But the alternative to not "playing god" is unacceptable, so far as I can see. We won't be able to feed our rising population without it, and given that mosquitoes are already a major danger to humans, particularly through spreading the sorts of diseases that might be a major problem of genetic engineering in the future anyway...I'm going to be fine with mosquito genocide, unless someone can think of a really, really good reason to avoid it, one that outweighs the deaths of 600,000 people per year that occur from malaria now.
People lack the intellegence for this sort of technology. Sterilizing a wild species is proof of that lack of intelligence.
People lack the intellegence for this sort of technology. Sterilizing a wild species is proof of that lack of intelligence.
I can't think of many things that would go wrong with it that would be worse than losing 600,000 people year year from malaria.
Maybe they'll mutate in unexpected ways. Oh well. Organisms will mutate on their own in unexpected ways anyway. The only real disadvantage I can think of might be them harming the food chain...but our primary concern should be humans, and they're directly causing harm to humans.
Worse case scenario, we lose a few natural food sources from populations that depend on mosquitoes dwindling. We're chipping away at all of that stuff anyway though.
Like I mentioned, it might be a bad idea, but I'm going to assume it's a good idea until someone shows a pretty convincing reason why it's not.
Now maybe this is not politics but it stands to be controversial.
I am no geneticist but the gist is, mosquitoes are genetically altered so males carry a gene that makes females infertile.
Is this a Michael Crichton nightmare waiting to happen when they find out the genetic change some how transfers over to humans?
Ok, I don't really understand the plastic flow chart. I went back and re-read it, and I don't think it completed itself. It's like the article drifted off right before the conclusion. Would someone please tell me if I got this right?
It's not cool for mosquitoes to eat plastic bcuz they get eaten by birds who in turn die, and when their bodies de-compose the plastic micro beads can get released into the air, which can wind up as a plastic bottle in which you ingest harmful bacteria?
Yes ⭕
No ⭕
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