If suitable biologists can be bought, then yes. I’m not certain how hard that is, though; most biologists are stuck in academic instutitions and ideology which tell them they need an IRB to sign off on their plan, and a lot of IRBs seem to be stuck in an ideology where they can’t do cost-benefit analysis and veto everything. It’s similar to the problem of organizing a COVID-vaccine challenge trial; the default outcome is that you try to find a grantee to do it, and they chicken out and do preliminary studies forever.
The information about how you would do a gene drive seems to be public information. CRISPR is public information. You don’t need a prestigious Western academic. The black market finds doctors who are willing to do all sorts of things like transplanting organs without IRB approval. If you go to Africa, I would be very surprised if you couldn’t bribe any local biologist into doing the experiment in a way where they wouldn’t take public credit for it.
If suitable biologists can be bought, then yes. I’m not certain how hard that is, though; most biologists are stuck in academic instutitions and ideology which tell them they need an IRB to sign off on their plan, and a lot of IRBs seem to be stuck in an ideology where they can’t do cost-benefit analysis and veto everything. It’s similar to the problem of organizing a COVID-vaccine challenge trial; the default outcome is that you try to find a grantee to do it, and they chicken out and do preliminary studies forever.
The information about how you would do a gene drive seems to be public information. CRISPR is public information. You don’t need a prestigious Western academic. The black market finds doctors who are willing to do all sorts of things like transplanting organs without IRB approval. If you go to Africa, I would be very surprised if you couldn’t bribe any local biologist into doing the experiment in a way where they wouldn’t take public credit for it.