Great article Max. I think it's worth mentioning that, outside of one or two proof of concept papers, CRISPR gene drives haven't been developed in vertebrate animals or in plants. It's very difficult to get Cas9 to cut and integrate a template reliably during development, and more often than not will result in resistance alleles which makes the organism immune to that gene drive. Depending on the effect of the gene that's being driven, these resistance alleles may be highly selected for in the population and thereby prevent the gene drive from spreading.
Gene drives are very difficult to engineer, especially for 'higher' organisms with complex DNA repair mechanisms and longer generation times. I work in the biocontrol space, and know several people who've spent their entire PhD trying and failing to get a drive to work. There are many valid concerns about the associated risks (I myself work with alternative technologies because I have doubts that gene drives will ever be publicly accepted outside of extreme cases), but this is not a scenario where some dude in his garage can just whip up a gene drive over the weekend for a couple hundred bucks to wipe out some species.
Hmm I didn't actually know it was so unproven outside of insects, this is useful to know.
And yeah you're definitely right that it's not something anyone could do in their garage. However, it's also not something that would be easy to lock down. There are tens of thousands of sub-state level actors who are competent enough to attempt a gene drive if they wanted to, e.g pharma companies, uni profs, other scientists etc. So it's still a pretty widely distributed tech.
For generational gene drives modifying the germ cells are of paramount importance. Otherwise you've just got a relatively crappy gene therapy. Germ cells also tend to be protected, so this is somewhat difficult to do.
And once you've done it, a herder is going to know if someone surreptitiously slips in a bunch of new livestock into the herd. A farmer is pretty much buying most of their seedstock from a supplier who controls the breeding. Et cetera.
Towards the end he talks about how, when he came up with the idea of the CRISPR-based gene drive, he thought through the safety implications in detail, before he even told George Church, who he was working with at the time. And he ended up publishing it because he decided it favored defense, for a few reasons, which he explains in the podcast.
I haven't heard this podcast, but I did hear the story about Esvelt thinking through the implications and concluding that gene drives were defense favoring. I'll check this out!
I would like to know how difficult it would be to target the parasite instead of the mosquito. It should be possible to make the mosquito kill the parasite, and spread this killing mechanism through a gene drive.
Great article Max. I think it's worth mentioning that, outside of one or two proof of concept papers, CRISPR gene drives haven't been developed in vertebrate animals or in plants. It's very difficult to get Cas9 to cut and integrate a template reliably during development, and more often than not will result in resistance alleles which makes the organism immune to that gene drive. Depending on the effect of the gene that's being driven, these resistance alleles may be highly selected for in the population and thereby prevent the gene drive from spreading.
Gene drives are very difficult to engineer, especially for 'higher' organisms with complex DNA repair mechanisms and longer generation times. I work in the biocontrol space, and know several people who've spent their entire PhD trying and failing to get a drive to work. There are many valid concerns about the associated risks (I myself work with alternative technologies because I have doubts that gene drives will ever be publicly accepted outside of extreme cases), but this is not a scenario where some dude in his garage can just whip up a gene drive over the weekend for a couple hundred bucks to wipe out some species.
Hmm I didn't actually know it was so unproven outside of insects, this is useful to know.
And yeah you're definitely right that it's not something anyone could do in their garage. However, it's also not something that would be easy to lock down. There are tens of thousands of sub-state level actors who are competent enough to attempt a gene drive if they wanted to, e.g pharma companies, uni profs, other scientists etc. So it's still a pretty widely distributed tech.
For generational gene drives modifying the germ cells are of paramount importance. Otherwise you've just got a relatively crappy gene therapy. Germ cells also tend to be protected, so this is somewhat difficult to do.
And once you've done it, a herder is going to know if someone surreptitiously slips in a bunch of new livestock into the herd. A farmer is pretty much buying most of their seedstock from a supplier who controls the breeding. Et cetera.
Have you heard Kevin Esvelt's interview on Rationally Speaking? http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/261-dangerous-biological-research-is-it-worth-it-kevin-esvelt/
Towards the end he talks about how, when he came up with the idea of the CRISPR-based gene drive, he thought through the safety implications in detail, before he even told George Church, who he was working with at the time. And he ended up publishing it because he decided it favored defense, for a few reasons, which he explains in the podcast.
I haven't heard this podcast, but I did hear the story about Esvelt thinking through the implications and concluding that gene drives were defense favoring. I'll check this out!
I would like to know how difficult it would be to target the parasite instead of the mosquito. It should be possible to make the mosquito kill the parasite, and spread this killing mechanism through a gene drive.