Yes, but why not disclose that you used AI in writing the article? Failing to follow journal guidelines is the fault here, not using AI for productive purposes.

aha, yes I am guilty I only read the first half of the article. That makes a lot of sense.

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.

Superstitious skepticism wins the day once again.

"In 1789, rumours spread like a virus across France: gangs of bandits were attacking villages, destroying crops and terrorizing peasants, mobilized by nobles trying to suppress political unrest. None of it was true. But the resulting panic and upheaval, called the Great Fear, helped to fuel the French Revolution — and provoked a debate that still divides historians.

Did a deliberate effort to advance revolution drive the rumours? Or did they emerge spontaneously, driven by genuine terror? Now, scientists have used the methods of epidemiology to solve the mystery. Drawing on historical records and models developed to trace epidemics, researchers conclude that the fearmongering had rational, not emotional, roots1. “We managed to identify the logic behind the dissemination of the Great Fear,” says Antoine Parent, an economist at University Paris 8 and a co-author of the study, published today in Nature."