Loading
What changed between revision 1 and revision 2, compared over the article's markdown source with its frontmatter — so a change to status, evidence or reversibility shows up as the edit it is.
Older · revision 1
Import· initial corpus import, not an edit
Initial import of content/gene-drive.md — the filesystem corpus, unchanged. Not an edit.
13.6 kB
Revision 1
Revision 2
lines 8–14 → 8–147 unchanged lines not shown
categories: ["genetics", "society"]categories: ["genetics", "society"]tags: ["crispr", "malaria", "ecology", "biosafety", "governance", "mosquitoes"]tags: ["crispr", "malaria", "ecology", "biosafety", "governance", "mosquitoes"]summary: "Genetic elements engineered to bias their own inheritance above the Mendelian half, allowing an introduced trait to spread through a wild population."summary: "Genetic elements engineered to bias their own inheritance above the Mendelian half, allowing an introduced trait to spread through a wild population."updated: "2026-07-27"updated: "2026-08-23"humanEvidence: "No drive-carrying organism has been released anywhere as of 2026, so the human outcome claimed for the technology, reduced malaria transmission, is untested; every suppression result comes from caged mosquito populations."humanEvidence: "No drive-carrying organism has been released anywhere as of 2026, so the human outcome claimed for the technology, reduced malaria transmission, is untested; every suppression result comes from caged mosquito populations."access: "Nothing to obtain: drives exist only in contained laboratory and cage colonies, and no regulator anywhere has authorised a field release."access: "Nothing to obtain: drives exist only in contained laboratory and cage colonies, and no regulator anywhere has authorised a field release."reversibility: "irreversible"reversibility: "irreversible"lines 70–75 → 70–8055 unchanged lines not shown
No gene drive organism has been released anywhere as of 2026. The most advanced programme, Target Malaria, a not-for-profit research consortium working on *Anopheles gambiae* in West and East Africa, has followed a deliberately staged path: first a release of genetically modified sterile males that could not persist, then male-biasing strains, with a drive release contemplated only after regulatory and community processes conclude. The releases conducted so far involved no drive.No gene drive organism has been released anywhere as of 2026. The most advanced programme, Target Malaria, a not-for-profit research consortium working on *Anopheles gambiae* in West and East Africa, has followed a deliberately staged path: first a release of genetically modified sterile males that could not persist, then male-biasing strains, with a drive release contemplated only after regulatory and community processes conclude. The releases conducted so far involved no drive. > [!caution] The staged path lost its flagship site> Burkina Faso's government terminated all Target Malaria activities on its territory on 22 August 2025, eleven days after a small-scale release of non-gene-drive male-biasing mosquitoes.[^targetmalaria2025]> Nothing molecular failed and no drive was involved: a national authority withdrew consent for a release of organisms engineered so that they could not persist.> The staged approach assumes each step earns the next; in the country where it had run furthest, the step that had just succeeded technically ended the programme instead. Two adjacent technologies are already deployed and are frequently confused with drives. Self-limiting modified male *Aedes aegypti* have been released at scale in Brazil and, in a smaller pilot, in the Florida Keys; they reduce local populations but disappear within generations and must be re-released. Mosquitoes carrying *Wolbachia* bacteria, which distort inheritance without any engineered nuclease, have been established in several cities and were associated with a large reduction in dengue incidence in a randomised trial in Indonesia.[^utarini2021] Both illustrate that population-level intervention is possible without a self-propagating edit.Two adjacent technologies are already deployed and are frequently confused with drives. Self-limiting modified male *Aedes aegypti* have been released at scale in Brazil and, in a smaller pilot, in the Florida Keys; they reduce local populations but disappear within generations and must be re-released. Mosquitoes carrying *Wolbachia* bacteria, which distort inheritance without any engineered nuclease, have been established in several cities and were associated with a large reduction in dengue incidence in a randomised trial in Indonesia.[^utarini2021] Both illustrate that population-level intervention is possible without a self-propagating edit. In mammals, drives remain far weaker. A drive built in mice copied itself only in the female germline and at rates too low to spread, so proposals to control invasive rodents on islands have no working molecular basis yet.[^grunwald2019] The gap between what is possible in an insect germline and in a mammalian one is a recurring theme in applied genetics, and it constrains conservation proposals as much as it constrains the edited proxy animals pursued under [[de-extinction]] by firms such as [[colossal-biosciences]].In mammals, drives remain far weaker. A drive built in mice copied itself only in the female germline and at rates too low to spread, so proposals to control invasive rodents on islands have no working molecular basis yet.[^grunwald2019] The gap between what is possible in an insect germline and in a mammalian one is a recurring theme in applied genetics, and it constrains conservation proposals as much as it constrains the edited proxy animals pursued under [[de-extinction]] by firms such as [[colossal-biosciences]].lines 111–116 → 116–12235 unchanged lines not shown
## References## References [^who2024]: `report` World Health Organization. *World Malaria Report*. Annual series; figures cited are from the 2024 edition. {WHO malaria deaths are modelled estimates rather than counted deaths, and carry wide uncertainty intervals.}[^who2024]: `report` World Health Organization. *World Malaria Report*. Annual series; figures cited are from the 2024 edition. {WHO malaria deaths are modelled estimates rather than counted deaths, and carry wide uncertainty intervals.}[^targetmalaria2025]: `statement` Target Malaria. "Target Malaria activities suspended in Burkina Faso." Project statement, 2025. {The project's own account of its shutdown, quoting the ministry communiqué of 22 August 2025. It records the sequence of events and not the government's reasoning, which the communiqué did not set out.}[^utarini2021]: `paper` Utarini, A. et al. "Efficacy of Wolbachia-infected mosquito deployments for the control of dengue." *New England Journal of Medicine*, 2021. {A cluster-randomised trial in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Wolbachia is not a gene drive and involves no engineered nuclease.}[^utarini2021]: `paper` Utarini, A. et al. "Efficacy of Wolbachia-infected mosquito deployments for the control of dengue." *New England Journal of Medicine*, 2021. {A cluster-randomised trial in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Wolbachia is not a gene drive and involves no engineered nuclease.}[^grunwald2019]: `paper` Grunwald, H. A. et al. "Super-Mendelian inheritance mediated by CRISPR–Cas9 in the female mouse germline." *Nature*, 2019.[^grunwald2019]: `paper` Grunwald, H. A. et al. "Super-Mendelian inheritance mediated by CRISPR–Cas9 in the female mouse germline." *Nature*, 2019.[^noble2019]: `paper` Noble, C. et al. "Daisy-chain gene drives for the alteration of local populations." *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, 2019. {The design is worked out in population-genetic models; the paper does not report a daisy-chain drive built in an organism.}[^noble2019]: `paper` Noble, C. et al. "Daisy-chain gene drives for the alteration of local populations." *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, 2019. {The design is worked out in population-genetic models; the paper does not report a daisy-chain drive built in an organism.}removed, struck through added, underlinedLine numbers count the serialised markdown of each revision, frontmatter included.
116 lines are the same in both revisions, and 98 of them are not shown. Neither revision here is necessarily the current article — read Gene drives for the text this wiki stands behind today.