Post
Conversation
![David Watson 🥑](data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="96" height="96"><rect fill-opacity="0"/></svg>)
Post your reply
I'm kidding, I'm sure this is going to be great with no side effects, giant mosquitoes or supermalaria
There could be a second order consequence to this that we're not seeing (re: Africa).
woah, they've killed more humans through malaria than literally anything else ever. We won the planet. God is real and we must continue to work to uncover all his systems at play.
What we really need is to make mosquitoes that find human specific scent markers repellent (but which are fitter in other ways so that they crowd out the old human blood loving mosquitoes).
If immunity to malaria was beneficial to mosquitoes we might have expected it to evolve by now. That it hasn't implies that either the costs of malaria immunity are higher than the benefits, or for some reason we don't understand, malaria parasites increase their hosts' fitness.
This isn't the hard part. The hard part is establishing a breeding population and getting approval to release over the shrieks of conservationalists
So how will they use it? How will the infected out compete the non-gmo mosquitoes?
In agriculture, prolonged use of herbicides like Roundup has led to weeds developing resistance over time. As a result, we've engineered "triple stack" genetically modified corn and soybeans to combat this. However, the weeds continue to adapt, forcing farmers to apply three
This has always been the silver bullet. Looks like they will actually be able to pull it off!
I thought someone invented a mosquito extinction gene drive ~10 years ago. Maybe it didn't work at scale.
The problem with a species like mosquitos is there are a lot of them and there is a lot of room for future mutations... One thing i worry about as we edit things that are inherited.
We don't have a good eraser if we make a mistake and a large population is created.
Next up Lyme/ticks
Quote
DoctorDueDiligence
@DueDoctor
Researchers found a way in 2021 to eliminate ticks throughout North America using CRISPR.
Lyme Disease costs US taxpayers $1.3BN a year.
Whats the hold up?
Breakdown of the paper behind it:
This study showed that changing just one tiny part of the mosquito's FREP1 can make it very hard for malaria germs to get inside. It's like putting a tiny shield inside the mosquito. And the best part is that this shield doesn't make the
In my opinion, this is how they will mass vacinate people against their will in the future
They will use CRISPR-Cas9 to modify mosquitos to deliver RNA through their saliva when they bite us.
You won't even know it when it happens. You'll just think you were bitten by a
This is why I need to stay off this app
I was feeling really good about my accomplishment of shooting 4 under for a round of golf
Meanwhile people are curing malaria
Ok note taken do more useful things
great, all that needs to be done is catch every mosquito alive and edit their genes
This is how you any one of 30 different post apocalyptic movies. The mosquitos evolve out of control or something self-replicates wrong and we get zombie malaria or car sized mosquitos.
If you can edit them to not transmit malaria
How soon before someone figures out a way for them to transmit something else
which pharma stock is most likely to be impacted by a massive reduction in Malaria?
am i the only one who thinks playing god like this is likely to result in some unintended consequence that may be greater than malaria ever was?
Unintended consequences?
What were the functions of the gene edited other than transmission of malaria?
Do they still carry malaria?
Ai slowly replacing the need for social media. I find out about trending topics on X, 24 hours before on Perplexity. Sort of interesting how much information compression optimized crawler services will replace the need for much of the internet. Already seeing this. Google link
bruhhhhh when do we figure out how to recombine the ecosystem so we can just stop needing mosquitos at all??
go talk to bats and be like can't you be vegetarian bruh???
trial run for humans, but yeah, they've been working on variations of this for 50 years now. maybe finally there.
For malaria, you could release genetically modified mosquitoes and hope for the best...
... but keto is another way to go.
Just saying.
escholarship.org/content/qt08w1
Not a fan of mosquitoes, but won’t this have catastrophic downstream consequences for growth in the developing world?
I would have rather made it so they die out, but I take this as an alternative.
This is doomsday clock stuff. We have no idea where the Chesterton Fences are with this stuff. Zombie Movie Intro Headline.
If it was alpha-gal I would get it, but it's malaria. Have they tried just improving their hygiene?
now make them sterile after a few generations and eliminate mosquitoes entirely.
Wait until the universe's balance comes in swinging hard af because it will
GIF
So, turns out it also made them a bit larger so we'll have to fix that on the next go around, but the good news is no malaria.
This has been done for decades. There is significant evidence how it saved the US cattle industry. (Or rather North American since we also saved Mexico)
Look back to 1970s!
Now the next project is how to make mosquitos banging each other like hell so that the next gen-edited generations will come sooner
You guys are retarded. They've been running these experiments in Africa for a while not and guess what? Both malaria and the mosquitos have already evolved around it. Even of you achieve success in the mosquitos the malaria will still want in and will find a way
Would be cool if they could do the same with ticks so they can't transmit lyme disease.
in three years time
"Weird Outbreak of Mosquito AIDS in Humans"
Call me alarmist, but I don’t think this is a good idea. I happen to remember Zika. Look into the genetically modified mosquitoes right before the bad outbreak a few years ago that caused so many birth defects.
Let's refrain from rejoicing till we see what the unintended consequences to this might be.
I don't know why this is a bad thing but something bad is going to happen out of this
That’s definitely not going to have unintended consequences
Nope not at all
Sounds great but I wonder if there's something downstream we haven't thought of. Law of unintended consequences.
My brother did this in Hawaii a few years back. It was really cool to go to his work site and see everything.
would it be funny/ironic if the key to overcoming all disease + aging is just mosquito manipulation?
A great scientific achievement, but its implementation would be woefully dysgenic
I can see applications of those bio-edits leading to very dark places.
However, in this particular case i think its an upside to humanity.
Malaria kills half a million blacks a year.
This is perhaps a Chesterton Fence
20yrs from now though there’s gonna be this amped up robo-mosquito that can’t be killed with a hand or a zapper
Didn’t they release some of these in Florida and Texas. Just to have malaria show up there.
My late great uncle Professor Brian Maegraith would’ve loved to see this day - he made reduction of malaria his life’s work
Science fiction becoming reality. Wonder what other disease vectors we could modify next to protect humanity?
Didn’t “they” do this like 7 years ago? I know they did in fact, I knew the guy doing it personally…
The only downside is that the mosquitoes are the size of birds. All price to pay.
There is *always* a price to pay for things we do, especially things we really don't understand but think we do. There are always unintended consequences .
Can’t wait for what they find out that they can do better now…
Spoiler: it’s unlikely to be good.
Every day you can find something to be impressed by that humans have done
Thank god. I love when we fix isolated problems with ecosystem wide solutions - surely what could go wrong.
What if malaria was preventing something worse…one time we made antibodies against S mutants for tooth paste, the bacteria that colonized caused way more cavities 
This is a monumental win for humanity. 
Engineering mosquitoes to stop transmitting malaria could save millions of lives and end a historic plague. It's a prime example of using science to reduce suffering.
However, releasing a self-replicating gene into the wild is a massive
Engineering mosquitoes to stop transmitting malaria could save millions of lives and end a historic plague. It's a prime example of using science to reduce suffering.
However, releasing a self-replicating gene into the wild is a massive
Playing God has its consequences...even if we're too stupid to see it right away. I dread the moment when we find out what the unintended consequence of this is.
The SciFi movie doesn’t turn out well for the humans. What are unintended consequences?
