Early in the morning a few days before Christmas, I was sitting in the living room of my mom’s New Zealand apartment, typing away on my laptop, when a parrot flew up, perched itself on the balcony railing and stared at me expectantly, as if demanding that I bring it a treat. It was a Kaka parrot, a large,…
A powerful and controversial new genetic engineering technology called a gene drive offers the potential to drastically reshape our world by overriding natural selection. And the US military’s research arm is one of the technology’s biggest research funders.
For the native species of New Zealand, European settlement was particularly cruel. The country has no endemic land predators, so many of its birds evolved without the typical avian aptitude for flight. Then came Western settlers, and along with them rats, mice, opossums, stoats, cats, and the occasional misbehaving dog
For more than half a century, scientists have dreamed of harnessing an odd quirk of nature— “selfish genes,” which bypass the normal 50/50 laws of inheritance and force their way into offspring—to engineer entire species. A few years ago, the advent of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology turned this science…
The stoat—a small, adorable, weasel-like mammal—is the one of the largest ecological threats in New Zealand. It’s a fierce invader with few predators that dines freely on the country’s endangered birds. The stoat did not come to New Zealand via any unfortunate accident. It was brought there on purpose, introduced in…
That the kiwi bird still exists at all is something of a marvel. Its native New Zealand has no endemic land predators, and so the bird evolved to be flightless. Today, its nests on the forest floor are under constant attack by invasive species—opossums, rats, feral cats and the occasional misbehaving dog.
Malaria is among the world’s deadliest diseases. It killed King Tut and Genghis Khan, along with as many as half of all of the people that have ever lived. And despite modern disease management strategies like insecticides, drugs and vaccines, in 2015 malaria still killed nearly half a million people. In fact, malaria…
This week, researchers at UCSF announced they’d uncovered a key to making their genetically-engineered creations a lot less likely to accidentally destroy the world: a way to turn-off modifications made with the powerful gene-editing technique CRISPR. Think of it like a kill-switch for genetic engineering.
The gene drive is quickly becoming one of the most controversial technologies of our time. Its possibilities are at once spectacular and alarming: by using genetic engineering to override natural selection during reproduction, a gene drive could allow scientists to alter the genetic makeup of an entire species. This…
Of all the potentially apocalyptic technologies scientists have come up with in recent years, the gene drive is easily one of the most terrifying. A gene drive is a tool that allows scientists to use genetic engineering to override natural selection during reproduction. In theory, scientists could use it to alter the…
