Gene drives are engineerable biological factors that raise the probability of a particular gene being passed on. They could be used to drive many wild species to extinction by promoting genes that makes one sex infertile.
Closes yes if we end up in a situation where anyone who knew the relevant biology (without very much additional specialist technical knowledge) could secretly develop and install a gene drive in a wild animal for less than 80,000 USD (inflation adjusted to 2024 USD).
Closes no in the case of the establishment of a regulatory regime, or a thoroughly pervasive community/industry standard in biotech device manufacturing that makes such actions difficult enough that the perpetrators would be likely to get caught.
@GCS Mm I guess it probably wouldn't come in the form of a demonstration of cheap gene drives, it would come in the form of an demonstrations of the parts of the process, with a credible (to me) argument that these parts could also do gene drives (then, imo, we'd get a demonstration later of applications to gene drives, but hopefully much later).
Happy to defer resolution to someone who's actively working in this area.
I was a bit concerned about "anyone", since I expect it to be banned in some jurisdictions, but I guess that wouldn't make any difference, even if you can't get hold of the required machines, you can still send an order to a lab in Russia, have someone over there do it, then just wait for the gene drive to reach your country! 👍