Burkina Faso is targeted by Western propaganda at the moment. Everything goes…
Superstitious skepticism wins the day once again.
Weaponized stupidity
Benedict says that without Burkina Faso’s participation, testing gene drive mosquitoes elsewhere in Africa will be more difficult. Because insects don’t respect borders, a decision to release them would likely need an agreement between many countries, he notes.
Why could not any other country replace Burkina Faso?
Basically Burkina Faso went out on a limb allowing them to launch the program, either not fully realizing that the mosquitos would eventually cross boarders and make this an international incident or just deciding they didn’t care and would do it anyway.
Burkina Faso is in the process of merging with several other countries to make a federated union in tha Sahel, most likely one of the other nations in the Pact found out about it and objected so they are coming down hard to save face.
Essentially there is enough skepticism of the technology among the African populace that this is now becoming a third rail issue for politicians. Those countries independent enough to not care what their neighbors think have populations against the technology, and everyone else is internationally minded enough to defer to the objectors.
That said, pesticide or no, the cat may be well out of the bag at this point, if a few of the test release mosquitoes survive it will only be a matter of time before the genes spread through the population. That’s the whole point of the gene drive.
Any Molecular biologists out there care to comment on whether the initial test releases that were done should eventually snowball anyway, or if they put in some kind of automatic generational die-off in the sequences?
My understanding of the Gene Drive was that it acted like a sort of super-dominant alele, with all subsequent progeny expressing the new trait. Not sure how that can be out back in the bottle after it gets out, just a matter of the number of generations it will take to go fully up the hockey stick.
Well as the article mentioned they haven’t gotten to the gene drive part yet, they were testing a mosquito that would masculinize female mosquitos and would only be passed down through regular Mendelian inheritance.
aha, yes I am guilty I only read the first half of the article. That makes a lot of sense.
