Comment by exabrial
7 hours ago
>It shouldn’t have to take fifteen years to deploy effective products that can save lives.
I completely disagree. This is a reasonable and responsible timeline to look for unintended consequences. Some things, you simply cannot undo.
What if the bacteria (somehow) jumped to monarch butterflies and killed them off? Controlled releases and multi-year environmental studies are the correct and responsible course of action. In fact, when the injected insects are released into an area, the entire thing should be monitored carefully, as each ecosystem might respond differently.
All of that being said, excited to see this adopted more broadly. It's time these fuckwit insects die.
I can imagine a scenario where the testing takes 15 years, and a scenario where the testing is done in 1 year. I think it's probably wrong to look at it purely as "we should wait X years". The author describes the 15 years as "regulatory limbo" implying that it was known as safe before that, but I have no idea whether that's the case.
In general, you have to weigh the irreversible cost of unintended consequences with the irreversible cost of known human death from mosquitoes.
There are many things for which a 1-year time horizon is too short, especially in large scale ecologies.
From what I understood, they didn't spend 15 years collecting data on the efficacy and risks of the product. Much of it was spent just waiting for regulators to respond.
The bacterial solution was the one that was fast tracked, while the safer genetic modification was delayed more.