I’m totally in favor of chlorinating that pool, but just bear in mind that the ‘registry of standard parts’, and other biological tools in general, like CRISPR, are nowwhere near as easy to use and reliable as it says on the packaging. I’m always amused by the contrast between articles about CRISPR which make it sound like you can just jam a thumbdrive into a mouse, and the people I know trying to get CRISPR to work on a new cell line or organism, who are up all night for months in a row muttering schizophrenically in the cell culture room. You need a lot of time and human capitol for these things.
Based on your more intimate knowledge and access to knowledge in the area, what kind of time frame (even an order of magnitude estimate would suffice, if the former is intractable) would we be looking at if an amount of resources, proportional to the potential humanitarian impact relative to mosquito transmitted diseases, where to be spent to develop a gene drive ready for use in the Tsetse fly, a species regarded as responsible for preventing an African ‘green revolution’ like was seen in Asia and thus part of the whole fable of African starvation? Any way to incorporate resource investment into mitigating relevant risks?. It seems like an academic has independently started thinking along the same lines.
I’m totally in favor of chlorinating that pool, but just bear in mind that the ‘registry of standard parts’, and other biological tools in general, like CRISPR, are nowwhere near as easy to use and reliable as it says on the packaging. I’m always amused by the contrast between articles about CRISPR which make it sound like you can just jam a thumbdrive into a mouse, and the people I know trying to get CRISPR to work on a new cell line or organism, who are up all night for months in a row muttering schizophrenically in the cell culture room. You need a lot of time and human capitol for these things.
Based on your more intimate knowledge and access to knowledge in the area, what kind of time frame (even an order of magnitude estimate would suffice, if the former is intractable) would we be looking at if an amount of resources, proportional to the potential humanitarian impact relative to mosquito transmitted diseases, where to be spent to develop a gene drive ready for use in the Tsetse fly, a species regarded as responsible for preventing an African ‘green revolution’ like was seen in Asia and thus part of the whole fable of African starvation? Any way to incorporate resource investment into mitigating relevant risks?. It seems like an academic has independently started thinking along the same lines.
See my answer on the other thread :) Difficult to estimate. You need a new method of transgenesis − 5-20 years?