What would be neat is if you could engineer them for five things.
[ol]
[li]Female offspring are nonviable for one reason or another.[/li][li]Male offspring survive and are healthy.[/li][li]Male offspring all carry the modification.[/li][li]Male offspring are more aggressive maters and mate more often than their natural counterparts.[/li][li]Male offspring tend to wander further afield than their natural counterparts.[/li][/ol]
I don’t know if some of those are even possible or how difficult they would be to engineer (or breed for).
The reality is the human vector is the real problem in any epidemic/pandemic.
Spraying one of any number of commercially available and long-studied larvicides/pesticides has similar short-term effects as the Oxitec solution on the local populations. The main question is sustainability and independence of action in the longer term for the cities/counties/states in the future. I wouldn’t advocate any public policy that ties these government entities to a single vendor/solution. In addition, many areas already have well developed mosquito control programs which can be ramped up more rapidly than a new one could be rolled out.
Ultimately I’d like to see A. Aegypti eliminated from the Americas because it’s an invasive species, and tech like Oxitec’s(in combination with the methods above) is probably our best long-term hope for that. But for this use, at this time, I don’t think it’s the right public policy choice.
Why is it you believe that government agencies and private individuals would ignore all other methods of mosquito control if we took advantage of Oxitec’s GM mosquitoes?
I’m reminded of objections to other genetically modified products, on the grounds that additional methods exist to produce healthier, less allergenic and more pest-resistant crops, or to produce purer and more effective medicines. This is often true, but why dismiss genetic modification techniques when they provide a significant part of the solution to a problem?
Echoing Jackmannii, howzabout a layered defense strategy? And what’s the basis for saying that Oxitec won’t add benefits at the margin?
And… even if Oxitec’s marginal benefits are somewhat under its marginal costs (assuming conventional techniques are applied as well) shouldn’t we want to do it anyway as a reward for past R&D? Presumably their tech will have wider applications after all.
Look, I haven’t done the C/B myself. But I can’t see the basis for dismissing it out of hand. Of course the strongest objections are alluded to in the OP: Oxitec’s solution is not natural.
Whether or not it actually makes sense as a solution is secondary to the point of my pitting. People were dismissing it out of hand for silly reasons, not because of any fact based analysis.
Fundamentally, these people are ignorant. They’ll decry pesticides and “chemicals” and all sorts of other things that are perceived as “unnatural”, yet they take advantage of plenty of other examples of just those things.
For example, they all likely either drink plastic bottled tap water, or regular old chlorinated tap water. Both of which are examples of synthetic chemicals in action. Or they’ll take antibiotics when they’re sick, or use antifungal creams on their toes if they get athlete’s foot. But woe betide the farmer who wants to use pesticides on their crops- damn those “chemicals”!
Or they’ll get bent out of shape about genetically modified food organisms, while having no problem with stuff like radiation breeding of plants or other similar techniques to essentially introduce random mutations into plants, in hopes of seeing what sticks and is beneficial. Somehow deliberately inserting a single gene into a specific place in a plant’s genome for insecticide resistance is a far greater sin than irradiating plants wholesale and seeing what happens “naturally”.
Agreed. And I apologize for my part in taking the thread in a different direction. People who oppose or support this proposal on grounds of “it’s scary!” or “it’s cool!” both need to educate themselves and bring something more than their fears/hopes to the conversation.
The only poster in this discussion who’s mentioned the “cool” tech factor is you, so I’m not sure what “people” you’re referring to.
I would still like to know why you think adopting a program to release genetically modified mosquitoes in areas under Zika virus threat would mean abandoning all other methods of controlling mosquito-borne disease.
Or does “taking the thread in a different direction” means “sorry gotta run Bye!”? :dubious:
Agreed. In contrast with Jackmannii, I see a fair amount of kneejerk “It’s cool” around, though not as much as “It’s scary”.
Well, there was one heuristic that was not mentioned. The original FB post was a sponsored post. And kneejerk reactions to corporate advertisements follow a reasonable heuristic. Which is unfortunate. I’m not sure what to do about this problem, but I might observe that it has never concerned the creators of such advertisements unduly.
Silly objections are fully pitable though and fully consistent with the mission of this message board.
The reality is the human vector is the real problem in any epidemic/pandemic.