It's interesting, but it's not really news in the debate in my mind. His argument is 'It's currently dangerous and unethical to do germ line modification on Homo Sapiens. At some point it won't be, so wait until then, and here's research that really should get done in the meantime.' It's a good and valid argument, but nothing revelatory. People are going to get hurt in the process of gaining knowledge, and I can say that with 100% certainty. The part that bugs me is the suggestion that there's nothing morally wrong with fucking with the genomes of species we have no intention of domesticating, like the mosquito he quoted. We shouldn't neuter the world so that successive generations get weaker, we should try to improve ourselves. The designer pet thing is definitely going to take off though among the wealthy. It's Crichtons vision from Jurassic Park, though a few decades late.
I know short-term plans would not be to make the mosquitoes die, but improve their resistance to malaria / prevent their ability to spread malaria. The author brushes over this issue, but it's pretty central to ecology: we never know in advance all of what a change to an ecosystem will affect. Gene drives would likely be impossible to reverse. As such, I doubt they would be used except in the most extreme of circumstances. Speaking of which, this has been on my reading list for a whileThe part that bugs me is the suggestion that there's nothing morally wrong with fucking with the genomes of species we have no intention of domesticating, like the mosquito he quoted. We shouldn't neuter the world so that successive generations get weaker, we should try to improve ourselves.
The designer pet thing is definitely going to take off though among the wealthy. It's Crichtons vision from Jurassic Park, though a few decades late.