Genetically modified mosquitoes breed in Brazil

I believe that study was peer reviewed by Roger Ebert.

Edit: off topic, but I just read that review from 1993 and it was pretty good - https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/jurassic-park-1993

I can't find the papers, but larvacides are not normally field used in trucks. They're usage is 1-2 gallon per ground acre with a dude wearing a hand pump backpack sprayer and when used in water, are dispersed by small row boats. Each area of the water is tested for concentration of larva and given the body of water and amount of larva found, a dosage is implemented. Now, that's not to say they aren't used in airplane dusters and in trucks as well. But that's not the main method of delivery. There are people in small outboard motor boats going through the Florida swamps putting this stuff in.

And yes, we do have a lot of great infrastructure in comparison. Fully aware of this. This doesn't mean that Africa is full of invalids that cannot adapt and overcome. Plus, don't think Africa is just some paleolithic continent. They do have industry and infrastructure. Not to western levels. But it's not all mud huts. But if aid money is going to be spent on combating mosquito borne diseases in third world countries, I want to see that money actually working for long term results. I'm fine with testing new methods. There's nothing wrong with that. But people keep jumping into these silver bullet schemes and ignore the tried and true methods because it's "antiquated". What I hate seeing is the public seeing these unicorn fart projects and thinking "There's the solution, no need to do anything else we've been doing." Because then policy makers think the same bullshit. And sadly, I'm not exaggerating. Whenever these pop up, comment boards always ring up "Why aren't we shoving all the money at this?". Because it's fucking stupid. That's why. The basic math doesn't even work in their best case scenario. And, I've said it elsewhere, I'm no mosquito expert. This is a side project/passion of mine. And I predicted the exact outcome after most of my knowledge stemming from a weekend reading papers and gov based mosquito control history (it's actually a ~100 year old scientific endeavor with a really rich and fascinating history, to me at least). But if a total dumbass like me is able to know what's going to happen and why it won't work, come on, seriously? I'm the first one to say, I'm a moron. But if I'm smarter at this topic than these "long time researchers", wtf? Caveat, not to say there aren't a lot of amazing entomologists out there doing great work. There's plenty. But I don't want to see half-ass-shitheads getting the money and glory compared to the real entomologists who are legit in making a real effort to leaving this world in a better way than how they came into it.

The genetic shtick is so attractive because it's sexy and lazy. That's why. Take a million bucks and you get to pick work in an A/C lab to make genetically modified mosquitoes that have a slim chance (at best) of working or buy half a million dollars worth of larvacide, go out into the heat of Africa/Asia/S. America to teach people how to test and apply it, and if any money is leftover from travel/manpower/etc, spend time in a hot and dangerous 3rd world countries to setup either small scale infrastructure projects or edu facilities for long term results. It's not hard too figure out which most people will gravitate to.

It's not about evidence of harm, its about evidence that the safeguard didn't work.

Imagine I was demoing an elevator with a backup stopping mechanism that kept it from going into free fall. So I hoist the elevator 10 feet up and cut the line, and the mechanism doesn't work, it falls immediately to the ground.

Would it be reasonable for me to say, "Nobody was hurt, the elevator only dropped 10 feet, so there's no real problem"? I would want the elevator sent back to design/engineering before I was willing to put any people on it.

The mosquitoes were not supposed to be able to breed, and they did. Not being able to breed was the safety valve. In this case, because the modifications were very minor, the effects of that are pretty minor, just a tiny bit of junk DNA. Because the rollout was small, the effects are small. I only hoisted the elevator 10 feet.

But before we doing larger rollouts or more sophisticated modifications, we should make sure that our safety valves actually work. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that we collectively prove we can get small things right before we start doing large things.

Maybe we are not discussing the same hypothesis.

null hypothesis: "We can put genetic alterations in the environment and expect them not to propagate" or if you prefer:

"Modified mosquitoes will never, ever escape and reproduce, because we are scientists, really smart, we know what we do, etc"

(Modified mosquitoes escape and reproduce)

Null Hypothesis is false, and Crichton is still a rich man. Next question.

I was discussing the comment I replied to - "Did no one watch Jurassic Park?" It's a good movie, but things that happen to imaginary scientists should not guide our decisions about real-world experiments.

I think the hypothesis of the experiment was something like "these genetic modifications will prevent mosquitos from reproducing". We know that the mosquitos did reproduce because the scientists deliberately included other modifications that would be easy to detect, and monitored the mosquito population to see if those genes showed up.

Contrary to your "we're so smart, we know what we're doing," caricature of the arrogant scientist, they made a hypothesis, carefully designed an experiment to disprove it, carefully gathered the data, and published a paper showing that their hypothesis was disproven. This is how science works. It doesn't mean that what they're trying to do is impossible, only that this approach didn't succeed.