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Abstract
Gene editing biotechnologies have introduced an unprecedented degree of power to reconfigure genomes, not only of living creatures, but also of their descendants, potentially for the rest of history. Such technologies can be applied for good purposes, such as preventing or treating genetic disease, or they can be misused and cause harm. Because potential outcomes are often mixed, involve uncertainties, and require assessment of value, ethical reflection is needed. This essay analyzes the ethical question of whether CRISPR technology should ever be used to drive to extinction an entire species-in this case, certain strains of mosquito that transmit malaria and other diseases deadly to humans. The principle of double effect, while helpful, guides the ethical assessment incompletely. Society must also grapple with the Promethean implications of a technology that places into the hands of imperfect people nearly absolute power over inherited genetic identity.
Be careful what you wish for, you may receive it
- Anonymous1
Introduction
In the 2016 Japanese film, If Cats Disappeared from the World, based on the novel Sekai kara Neko ga Kieta nara by Genki Kawamura, the devil appears to a young man diagnosed with a terminal illness and offers to extend his life incrementally in exchange for his agreeing to let the devil remove, each day, one type of thing or creature for all of time, as if it had never existed. With each removal, he finds that his most precious human relationships, which had been inextricably connected in unnoticed ways with the things now absent, are tragically and irretrievably depleted.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that it were possible to eliminate a chosen species from planet Earth. If there is any one species for which a compelling case might be made for its deliberate extinction, the mosquito ranks high. Mosquito-borne illnesses are a leading cause of human suffering and death worldwide. As many as 700 million people across the globe are infected and more than a million die each year from mosquito-borne protozoan, viral, bacterial, and helminthic diseases, many of which target the human nervous system, among other organs.2
Mosquitoes, which constitute the family Culicidae, actually comprise more than 3500 species, some of which transmit malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, West Nile virus, Eastern equine encephalitis,...