Gene drive gives scientists power to hijack evolution - STAT
▻http://www.statnews.com/2015/11/17/gene-drive-hijack-evolution
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http://www.statnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Mosquito_GettyImages-1024x576.jpg As soon as Harvard biologist Kevin Esvelt began reading the scientific paper, he had a desperate question: Who are these guys?
The authors had used a controversial new molecular technique to try to force a certain gene to be inherited by all of a fruit fly’s offspring. Confounding a basic principle of genetics, they had succeeded. Nearly every one of the young flies carried the gene, for yellow pigmentation.
While turning a bunch of flies yellow may sound innocuous, “gene drives” — as biologists call the cellular machinery that guarantees inheritance — have enormous potential promise as well as risks. Because gene drives could rapidly propagate novel DNA through an entire population in the wild, they could be used, proponents say, to eradicate marauders such as the cane toads overrunning Australia. They might make mosquitoes resistant to the microbes that cause malaria or dengue fever, or even block the gene that makes locusts swarm, saving millions of tons of crops every year.
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