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GM fungus can rapidly kill mosquitoes that spread malaria, study suggests

bbc.co.uk

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Re: GM fungus can rapidly kill mosquitoes that spread malaria, study suggests

#141

Post by killjoywashere »

Kalium wrote: post #88
_Microft wrote: post #45

People do not take issue with doing something against malaria but with the proposed method. How could it be stopped if something went wrong? It's not like a chemical agent that you just stop applying when you notice adverse effects. This is a living thing. Living things can procreate, mutate, enter new niches and the only deciding factor is the rate of reproduction. Life doesn't optimize for killing malaria-carrying…

Perhaps there might be a higher level question at hand here. What level of caution is appropriate when the deliberate choice of inaction has a price tag of six digits of lives attached? What level of risk and potentially unforeseen consequences are we willing to accept? This is not an idle question. It's a critical question for informing a decision-making framework that rests on calculation. Which we need here - I th…

This is a situation where the potential risk that comes with the new invention of man is catastrophic. It's on the same level of Hamming having to, while onthe Manhatten Project, calculate the odds of igniting the atmosphere. There is existential risk to our species and possibly all animal life. So, yeah, we can spend a few years trying to learn about the mutability of this bug.

Re: GM fungus can rapidly kill mosquitoes that spread malaria, study suggests

#142

Post by Kalium »

killjoywashere wrote: post #141
Kalium wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps there might be a higher level question at hand here. What level of caution is appropriate when the deliberate choice of inaction has a price tag of six digits of lives attached? What level of risk and potentially unforeseen consequences are we willing to accept? This is not an idle question. It's a critical question for informing a decision-making framework that rests on calculation. Which we need here - I th…

This is a situation where the potential risk that comes with the new invention of man is catastrophic. It's on the same level of Hamming having to, while onthe Manhatten Project, calculate the odds of igniting the atmosphere. There is existential risk to our species and possibly all animal life. So, yeah, we can spend a few years trying to learn about the mutability of this bug.

I fully agree.

I'm suggesting that some sort of risk evaluation framework more sophisticated than "Gee, I can imagine a scenario where this kills us all!" might be in order.

Re: GM fungus can rapidly kill mosquitoes that spread malaria, study suggests

#143

Post by enraged_camel »

fiter wrote: post #138
enraged_camel wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, we cannot afford to be paralyzed by concerns about black swans. If we did, nothing would get done.

I don't think the book and others with similar thoughts suggest anything like being paralyzed with fear, so we should be OK here.

I disagree. The often unstated sentiment under such thoughts is always "hmm, this sounds way too crazy, we probably shouldn't do it because it feels too much like 'Playing God'!".

It's a form of concern-trolling: deep down inside you are against something, but don't want to say that openly, so instead you pretend to side with the proponents, but choose to play the role of "concerned citizen" and invent scary scenarios at the extreme ends of the probability spectrum, with the suggestion that "we should probably research this thing more before we try it!"

Re: GM fungus can rapidly kill mosquitoes that spread malaria, study suggests

#145

Post by LifeLiverTransp »

enraged_camel wrote: post #131
jeffdavis wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you want to take a calculated risk. I'm not convinced that this is a calculated risk -- it's an unbounded risk. What if it, for example, kills of pretty much all of the insects over a large part of the earth?

These types of examples aren’t useful though because you can make up any number of them, and make them as extreme as you want. Risk management, on the other hand, is about determining risks that are reasonably likely , and figuring out contingencies and mitigation strategies. In your opinion, is it reasonably likely that a fungi that is engineered to kill a specific species of insect (and only those carrying a specif…

Like the number of nuclear meltdowns in a thousand years?

Re: GM fungus can rapidly kill mosquitoes that spread malaria, study suggests

#146

Post by LifeLiverTransp »

jfoster wrote: post #101
_Microft wrote: post #45

People do not take issue with doing something against malaria but with the proposed method. How could it be stopped if something went wrong? It's not like a chemical agent that you just stop applying when you notice adverse effects. This is a living thing. Living things can procreate, mutate, enter new niches and the only deciding factor is the rate of reproduction. Life doesn't optimize for killing malaria-carrying…

Couldn't this argument be applied to any living thing, not just the ones that humans have engineered? As soon as anything can mutate to enter a new niche, it will work the same way as this would.

Usually we breed organisms for weekness. Many of our farm animals and plants wouldnt survive without our protection.

Also mutations, often have to overcome obsticles to conquer a new niche. They have to reach a specific habitat or deploy seeds at a distribution system (cars driving dirt roads e.g.).

Lets take a nice little SciFi Example- NASA breeds in its lab a terraformer for venus, a sort of airborn spirondella. This could potentially wipeout all live below, by covering a planet with green "living" clouds.

Now this organism could escape the lab, bot as long as it does not reach a warm, wet climate it is dormant. So even if this dangerous organism was out there- it could potentially deteriorate before it reaches the equatorial belt and starts to bloom.

Nothing is certain in nature, but one thing- if its a success - it trys to be a exponential success.

Re: GM fungus can rapidly kill mosquitoes that spread malaria, study suggests

#147

Post by craigsmansion »

saulrh wrote: post #140
craigsmansion wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your counter examples are about the mitigation of unexpected and unwanted effects. These were implemented after the fact. There are situations that have no possibility of redress. Your paragraph about ecological impact can serve as an example of the lurking danger. I wasn't even concerned about ecological impact. My concern was about artificially creating a resistant species. That's one of the pitfalls here. We're ta…

> I wasn't even concerned about ecological impact. I spat out a post in ten minutes that looked further out than you did. I wasn't even trying. The people that actually do this stuff are trained, credentialed biologists and ecologists that have taken courses on this and spend literal decades reading studies about proposals and going down checklists of things that have caused problems in the past. It is literally thei…

> that looked further out than you did.

Very much so. You were presenting how there would be no danger to the ecosystem if these three sub-species were successfully destroyed. I never got as far because I wondered about the similarities of population regrowth after destruction with insecticide and destruction with modified organisms.

> Before you bring up the recent boeing failures

I don't need to. Building nuclear facilities is (usually) a very rigorous field with the highest quality of engineering, but sometimes factors of design considerations interact in ways that create new conditions that were impossible to predict. And since you mentioned aeroplanes: if you look at NTSB reports, you often find the cause of crashes is a long chain of trivial events, every single one of them meticulously checklisted and tested with fallback modes to avert disaster. It's not the components, but the intractability of the web of interaction.

> Why do you think that evolution and resistance are novel failure modes

Because evolution and resistance are novel failure modes in the context of genetically designed natural enemies. Previous statistical models might not hold even though the situations modeled appears exactly similar.

> why do you think they'd have been missed in the analysis?

Genetic modification is a statistical process, much like an AI network where something goes in and the output is measured for fitness and fed back. Random artifacts are to be expected and accounted for, but cannot be known to exist before the fact. As such their model might be complete, but it might not be sound.

As you implied, rigor is important, and faced with potentially irreversible consequences, skepticism is not an unnatural or irrational response.

Re: GM fungus can rapidly kill mosquitoes that spread malaria, study suggests

#148

Post by pvaldes »

maxerickson wrote: post #68
_Microft wrote: post #45

People do not take issue with doing something against malaria but with the proposed method. How could it be stopped if something went wrong? It's not like a chemical agent that you just stop applying when you notice adverse effects. This is a living thing. Living things can procreate, mutate, enter new niches and the only deciding factor is the rate of reproduction. Life doesn't optimize for killing malaria-carrying…

The limiting factor ends up being competition much more than it ends up being rate of reproduction. For example, we'd get sick a lot more if we weren't teeming with more or less symbiotic organisms. A fungus that specializes in infecting Anopheles and also destroys the resource that it is optimized to consume isn't just going to up and start dissolving rubber.

> A fungus that specializes in infecting Anopheles

Research was made in the nine species known of the genus Metarhizum. Some of them are known to science since only 10 years ago when some of the species were better studied and split and hidden species appeared.

Some species seem to be specialist, like M. acridi, that target grasshoppers. Other are generalist, like M. anisopliae that can attack insects of seven different orders. Some spores can be diseminated by water and target aquatic larvae, other spread by the air. Surprisingly, M. anisopliae is sold since a few years and used with the purpose to kill beetles of several species, and planned to use it to kill ticks and mosquitoes.

Source: Journal of Funghi 2017, 3 (30).

So first doubt, are the species used in research really specialist and selective?

"A transgenic, broad host-range M. anisopliae strain expressing an insect neurotoxin (AaIT) from Androctonus australis reduced mobility and blood feeding interest of adult Aedes aegypti mosquitoes"

"broad-host range" looks the opposite term to "specialist" to me

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6128571/

More things: Mosquitoes die quickly

"Since M. pingshaense spores take 2–3 days to penetrate host cuticle, RFP and Met-Hybrid do not cause mortality 24 hours post-infection ... Met-Hybrid achieved >80% mortality within one week with LT80’s of 5.18±0.482 days, 5.54±0.326 days and 5.25±0.269 days for Anopheles coluzzii, An. gambiae and An. Kisumu, respectively".

So when it says "fungus rapidly kills mosquitoes", maybe should say, "fungus kills mosquitoes between 2 and five days"

"The fungus has been given genes to produce an insecticide, known as a “hybrid”, first extracted from the Australian funnel-web spider and already approved in the US for treating crops."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/malaria-mosquitoes...

This is what the independent says. I haven't found an official source for this claim but if true, I don't have words for this fact, only expletives. Has somebody asked american citizens if they agreed to participate in this experiment?

Re: GM fungus can rapidly kill mosquitoes that spread malaria, study suggests

#149

Post by dang »

falsedan wrote: post #75
pvaldes wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course having 3000 species of spiders to choose they needed to play with the cool funnel-web spider. One of the most deadly spiders for humans. Wise choice. Atracotoxins. Stuff extremely toxic for a particular kind of animal: primates, causing pulmonary and cerebral edema in humans. Fortunately for mosquitoes, atracotoxins are relatively weak as insect killer. Big spiders rely in their fangs to subdue the prey. My…

you realise this is a carefully-controlled scientific experiment and not the latest Telsa model rollout, right?

Please don't post in the flamewar style to Hacker News.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: GM fungus can rapidly kill mosquitoes that spread malaria, study suggests

#150

Post by dang »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #97
falsedan wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you realise this is a carefully-controlled scientific experiment and not the latest Telsa model rollout, right?

What is a 'carefully-controlled scientific experiment'? Please link me to the documentation of the safety controls they used and also to the body that verifies that they actually followed those controls properly and effectively. Hint: Neither thing exists.

Please don't post in the flamewar style to Hacker News.

We've had to ask you multiple times not to break the site guidelines. Would you mind reviewing them?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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