
GM fungus can rapidly kill mosquitoes that spread malaria, study suggests - hbilar2
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-48464510
======
_Microft
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 mosquitoes, it optimizes for rate of reproduction and
survival. As soon as there is a mutation that can extend the niche to another
target, this will happen. And getting such a match doesn't have to be via a
mutation on the fungus either, it can also be one of the target, making it
susceptible to it.

How do you make sure these things don't happen? I'm worried that the answer is
that you can't.

( _Edit:_ I'm not even talking about engineered organisms, just have a look at
a list of invasive species)

~~~
Kalium
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
think we can all agree that personal ick-factor is a bad approach to large-
scale public policy.

Which is to say you're right. We _cannot_ be certain that won't happen with
this approach. Indeed, we cannot be certain of all consequences with any
approach.

With that in mind, what level of certainty should we require?

~~~
jeffdavis
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?

~~~
enraged_camel
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 specific disease)
can somehow go out of control and end up killing all insects on the planet? In
my opinion, it is not.

~~~
fiter
I think there are a number of people waking up to the level of concern that
you need to put on unbounded risks. See the popular book, The Black Swan. To
throw out these large but improbable risks is taking a large part out of these
distributions. Maybe it's not a good idea.

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

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

~~~
enraged_camel
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!"

~~~
fiter
That's not the underlying reasoning and I have heard very clear arguments. The
argument goes something like 'the extremely impactful event has never occurred
in the past so our risk assessment is very vulnerable to large magnitude
errors'.

What is encouraged is taking actions that have well understood _OR_ bounded
risk.

By bringing up "concern-trolling", I am concerned you have given up the fight.
By avoiding the direct argument and retreating to this supposed hidden
argument, which is much easier to counter, there is not anything left to
discuss. Tell me if I am misunderstanding.

------
craigsmansion
The previous magic bullet against Malaria was called
Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, commonly known as DDT.

DDT worked very well, initially, but its effects and consequences were
intractable and long-term. It's still deployed to various degrees of
effectiveness, but usage is far more complex than the initial promise of
getting rid of Malaria.

A GM fungus 99% kill rate sounds good, but for insect populations that might
not be enough. You likely can't use it again to kill 99% of the 1% left, and
so on.

DDT is a chemical. You can stop using it to mitigate some of the unforeseen
side effects. How can one retrieve or stop GM fungi in the wild? What patterns
of resistance will emerge?

With DDT we got "lucky". It turned out to be overall effective when combined
with guidelines and different approaches, but it never rooted out malaria
completely by itself in one fell swoop.

Creating natural enemies of a pest by genetic modification is a valid
approach, but not something to deploy wide-scale at the first hint of success.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#Malaria_control](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#Malaria_control)

~~~
saulrh
This is like arguing that the Model T demonstrates that cars will never be
safe enough to drive.

Yes, there are ways to do this wrong. We have a much better idea what they are
and our standards for precision and reliability are much higher. The 1940s are
long gone and we aren't the baby boomers. We require seat belts in all cars,
houses to be built to fire and electrical codes, and household chemicals to
have plain labels and clear warnings.

We also now know that we need to specifically target something like three sub-
species of mosquito and that if we hit exactly those three the ecological
impact will be essentially zero; we've verified that they don't compete with
anything and that nothing eats them and that they don't interact in any of the
dozens of ecological systems that professional biologists understand that
programmers never learn about. We know that we need to hit exactly those sub-
species because DDT happened. We know that we need to study things like
evolution rates and virulence before deploying engineered organisms; we have,
after all, all watched Jurassic Park.

The people working on this understand what will happen if their solution isn't
good enough. You are not adding anything to this situation except uncharitable
negativity. You cite DDT. I'll cite Greenpeace, whose blind opposition to
nuclear power is still contributing to the ongoing death of our planet. Don't
be Greenpeace.

~~~
craigsmansion
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 talking about the same thing, but because it's new we're not addressing
the same issue.

We got away with DDT because:

\- We could stop using it.

\- There were alternatives that reshuffled the genepool of a now largely
resistant population the other way, after the fact.

These two are not a given when deploying engineered organisms. Even though
both are means to fight malaria, they are not the same and need different
considerations of which some are new and not valid for any older approaches.

> The people working on this understand what will happen if their solution
> isn't good enough.

So do most programmers...

~~~
saulrh
> 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 their job to make sure nobody can
say "You didn't consider X" during review, on the news, or in court.

Back in tenth grade I took an honors biology course. The year's final project
was to write an environmental impact statement for, if I recall correctly,
chopping down twenty or thirty trees in a nearby park. In retrospect, we
worked off what I suspect was a _massively_ stripped-down version of a tiny
fraction of the real rules.

It took five of us a month and we wrote a hundred pages single-spaced.

> So do most programmers...

I certainly won't argue that the field of software engineering doesn't need
more rigor - there are reasons that I prefer writing cleaner code than my
coworkers often do. But this proposal isn't operating in the same regime I
usually do.

I mangle data at scale for a fuzzy rules-engine type thing. I bet you do
something with comparable correctness requirements. There are times I've
looked at a bug, looked at the logs, figured out the underlying conditions,
estimated the future occurrence, concluded that I spent more money just
looking at the logs than it would cost to remediate the data by hand for the
next ten years, and estimated that it'd take me three times as long to
actually fix it. I _do_ know what happens when my solutions aren't good
enough, and I bet you do too.

Aerospace and defense programmers operate in a regime far more like what we
see with these environmental proposals. And guess what? They know what happens
when their code isn't good enough... and they have huge checklists that they
go down for every single change and have their code audited regularly and
tested obscenely thoroughly and spend weeks tracking down tiny bugs, stamping
them out, and adding them to the checklist.

(Before you bring up the recent boeing failures: Take a look at the politics
and incentives. Where did the economic and political incentives lie there?
Where do you think the economic and political incentives lie for a proposal
like this? Especially given how much environmental fearmongering we see as a
result of movies like Jurassic Park? Do you think that anyone would dare
approve a project like this with anything less than every single i dotted and
every single t crossed?)

> but because it's new we're not addressing the same issue.

Development of resistance is such a well-known failure mode for pest-control
tools that wikipedia's page on DDT has a whole second-level paragraph titled
"Mosquito resistance".

Why do you think that evolution and resistance are novel failure modes, and
why do you think they'd have been missed in the analysis?

~~~
craigsmansion
> 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.

------
pvaldes
Do you know why 99,99% of the extant spiders are harmless to humans?

1) Because many spiders (but not all) are evolved to target insect methabolism
instead mammal methabolism

2) Because spiders aren't bees. The majority are solitary and small, have a
limited body size and can just inject a single tiny dose of its extra-potent
poisons.

3) and their tiny chelicers are too small and weak to pierce the human skin
until reaching a layer with circulatory system so the poison is stopped by the
stratum corneum of dead cells in epidermis and other upper layers of skin

Now lets suppose that a spider could grow indefinitely and make an unlimited
amount of poison, like a fungus

And lets suppose that spider poison could be breathed directly and pass from
lungs to blood wessels, and acumulated all day like fungus spores entering in
your nose

What could happen? shalalala

Maybe nothing

or maybe any insect of any species would be poisoned eventually in presence of
spores. They take air directly. Result: collapse of agriculture by
simultaneous decrease of suitable pollinators at all levels

or maybe humans would have a new type of allergy, part allergy part nervous
poisoning.

People tired of breathing poison all day after a strong rain? People now
allergic to a previously harmless and widespread fungus present everywhere?,
in its modified and wild forms?

~~~
pvaldes
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 congratulations for the
people that so carefully designed this experiment.

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

~~~
ltbarcly3
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.

~~~
dang
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
sergioisidoro
This is scary. Not because GM or mosquito populations. This is scary because
we don't know enough of fungi role in the environment. Yes, we know this
species infects the mosquitos but what else? What other roles does it have?

And with fungi this is especially dangerous because spores get literally
everywhere and are hard to eliminate!

Unless we can ensure the fungus is engineered to not generate viable spores on
a second generation this is a recipe for disaster.

------
jddj
These threads about whether it's moral to kill mosquitoes en masse always seem
to end up being about unintended consequences and ecosystem collapse.

Some points to consider:

\- Those who study the strains of mosquito (a generous 50 out of ~3500) which
spread disease in humans regularly state that they are not a primary food
source for any one predator.[1]

\- Malaria killed 429 000 people in 2015, 90% of those being in Africa, and
many of them children.[2]

\- All of our current control methods have unintended consequences. Take for
example that NGOs who offered insecticide-treated mosquito nets to communities
found that they were being used in waterways for fishing.[3]

\- In developed nations we are happily deploying much less targeted solutions
without significant levels of complaint (and to counter relatively less
serious mosquito-borne diseases), such as the indiscriminate aerial spraying
of insecticides over large areas and waterways.[4]

Everything is a trade-off, admittedly, and we can never know the full set of
consequences in advance (see: the impacts of introduced species), but it might
be a useful exercise to weigh your concerns against the benefits to sub-
saharan Africa as a whole (and to individual African families) that could
materialize were these particular strains of mosquito to be eliminated.

And give a little credit to those educated people doing the research into the
likelihood of ecosystem collapse and producing reasonable peer-reviewed
results.

Edit to add: That said, I'm personally partial to the efforts which release
genetically-sterilised males. That seems less like the plot of a Hollywood
doomsday movie than a spider-venom fungus.

[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/09/13/what-would-
hap...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/09/13/what-would-happen-if-we-
eliminated-the-worlds-mosquitoes/)

[2]
[https://www.who.int/features/factfiles/malaria/en/](https://www.who.int/features/factfiles/malaria/en/)

[3]
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/31/global-u...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/31/global-
use-of-mosquito-nets-for-fishing-endangering-humans-and-wildlife)

[4] [https://www.cdc.gov/zika/vector/aerial-
spraying.html](https://www.cdc.gov/zika/vector/aerial-spraying.html)

~~~
BinaryResult
I'm curious, if we had the power to just snap our fingers and irradiate all
mosquitoes, do we have consensus to do so? I worry about unforeseeable
consequences.

~~~
jvanderbot
I dont. Species go extinct all the time and we're already trying to kill them
all with bad side effects like indiscriminate pesticides.

This is one case of me falling on the side of intervention. Malaria is a
terrible scourge, primarily on children. So much so that humans evolved sickle
cell anemia as a prevention.

[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/2/l_012_02.html](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/2/l_012_02.html)

------
ajnin
How effective is a double layer of mosquito netting at stopping fungal spores
? The workers in the photos don't seem to be wearing any sort of protection
equipment either. This seems like a very carelessly conducted experiment. The
fungus is in the wild at this point. Fungi are very persistent and our immune
system is not well equipped to deal with them, much more care should be
required to avoid release in the environment of a pathogen agent not
thoroughly tested and evaluated.

------
Amygaz
This paper is just a stunt. I searched for previous publications with the same
fungus against anopheles, and 2015 study showed a natural isolate that was
already 90% lethal.

That strain also kill some rice grubs.

The controlled installations in the picture look pretty piss-poor, such that
GMO is already in the wild by now.

------
amarant
Good efforts! I'm still slightly partial to that other approach where they
genetically modified the mosquitos themselves to only produce male offspring,
in such a fashion that the gene was dominant and thus soon there would be only
male mosquitos.

Still, if there's been a snag in the road for that approach, this appears to
be a viable alternative

~~~
jimworm
I'd much prefer the (theoretical) gene drive.

Bad outcomes for gene drive are either that it doesn't work, or the mosquitoes
go extinct in nature and cause more ecological issues by their absence. The
worst problem is fixable by keeping live specimens for reintroduction. In
fact, since malaria is the target and not the mosquitoes, reintroduction might
be a good idea after malaria becomes extinct.

Bad outcomes for the fungus is it becoming uncontrollable and starts killing
other insects. Reintroduction becomes impossible without engineering a new,
immune mosquito. Or that evolution backfires on the spider and causes them to
go extinct. Or all of those happening together.

Comparing the two, the fungus has all the downsides and more, with zero
upside.

~~~
andygates
The fungus doesn't affect other insects - this was part of the test. So the
worst case is that it becomes uncontrollable and wipes out the mosquitoes.

~~~
jimworm
I was justifying my preference for the gene drive compared with the fungus.
The fungus has potential to evolve independently to do different things, the
gene drive does not. QED.

------
ptah
What unintended consequences could large scale deployment have?

~~~
bayesian_horse
The fungus is supposed to be deployed on a rather small scale. It is not
infectious for other insects, so it's probably not able to spread very far.
Most of all, it is already freely spreading in its natural form, and does not
lead to mass extinction of these malaria mosquitos, proven by the fact that
they still exist...

On top of that the spider venom is probably bad for the fungus. Apart from
taking away resources from synthesizing actually useful proteins, it kills the
hosts much more quickly. The fungus probably prefers to kill the host slowly
in order to cover more distance.

~~~
fiblye
>It is not infectious for other insects

Yet.

It’s definitely possible for it to adapt to infect something that’ll help it
proliferate farther.

~~~
bayesian_horse
Which would be a much bigger evolutionary leap compared to losing the spider
venom. And dauntingly big for a fungus that kills off 99% of hosts in the
region that quickly.

I presume that the fungus is obligatorily parasitic, meaning it can't thrive
outside its host, except as a spore. This is true for most pathogenic fungi.

From the article it's not even clear that the fungus "spreads" well or at all
in a mosquito population. I think they intend to grow the spores large-scale
in a lab, and infect most of the mosquitos directly, and not through secondary
transmission...

Also: The fungus already exists in the wild. It just doesn't kill the host
that quickly.

------
throwaway13337
Predictable negativity from the comments here ignores that over one million
people die of malaria per year.

Not using what we can against something this horrible is a choice, too. And
one that has the greater of consequences.

It's easy to poke holes in things from the sidelines. That action is actively
causing us to drag our feet and kill a lot of people.

It should also be noted that mosquitoes are not depended on as a basis for any
known food chain.

~~~
ghostDancer
We have to take into account that with climate change the area where the
mosquitoes live will probably be wider affecting more people so extending
malaria to bigger populations. IMHO, can be wrong , that we have not made a
lot against malaria because till now it affected only poor countries but from
now on it will probably arrive to richer ones.

~~~
YokoZar
The rich countries drained their swamps to end malaria starting in the 19th
century. It was one of the first major public works projects.

~~~
keyfl
What exactly is stopping 3rd world countries from doing that?

~~~
zapita
Third world countries have already financed the draining of European swamps.
It’s the wealth stolen in Asia, Africa and America that made those public
works projects possible in the first place.

The reason former colonies haven’t been able to do the same at home is because
their society and economy are permanently crippled by colonization.

~~~
pygy_
Not sure why you're being downvoted.

Colonization, was brutal, self-serving, and its economic consequences are
still felt to this day (especially when neocolonialism through private
corporations and puppet governments is still a thing).

~~~
thaumasiotes
It's probably this incredible nonsense:

>> The reason former colonies haven’t been able to do the same at home is
because their society and economy are permanently crippled by colonization.

Here's an interesting passage from _Early China: A Social and Cultural
History_ (
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GA22L0E/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GA22L0E/)
):

> Even when we are talking only about the areas that can be considered as part
> of Early China, back in a time when "China" as a nation was still in her
> infancy, we find that more cultural developments had taken place in the
> valleys and strips of plains that are surrounded by mountains and plateaus
> on the second step mentioned above, or on the transitional belts along the
> major mountain ranges, but not at the centers of the floodplains located in
> the east. The reason for this development was simply ecological, given the
> fact that in the second millennium BC most of the eastern China plains were
> still covered by marshes and lakes[2], and the coastline in some sections
> was at least 150 km inland from today's seashores. The pre-Qin texts record
> the names of more than forty marshes or lakes on the North China Plain, most
> of which had dried out after the third century AD. In fact, for millennia
> the North China Plain was continuously caught in the process of
> sedimentation by the Yellow River which carried on its way east huge
> quantities of earth from the topographical second step [areas 1-2 km above
> sea level].

> [2] Even in the historical period, it was recorded that the Yellow River had
> changed its course some twenty-six times.

The Yellow River killed vast numbers of Chinese who farmed its banks, even
being given the name "China's sorrow". But efforts were made:

> Over time, as the bottom of the channel gradually rose, the river overflowed
> its banks. Dikes were built ever higher to prevent flooding, and in some
> places the river started to flow above the surrounding countryside. Today,
> in a stretch of about 1,100 miles, the Yellow River moves along 11 yards
> above the plain.

> Under the Qin and Han empires [roughly 200 BC - 200 AD], the Yellow River
> was the core of Chinese civilization, home to around 90 percent of the
> population.

(
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003TXT09W/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003TXT09W/)
)

During that period, the Chinese hadn't really settled farther south,
because... it was full of swamps. But the swamps were drained, the people
moved in, and the Yangtze River basin and areas further south had become the
demographic center of China by the end of the Tang dynasty in, um, 900 AD.

Tang China was probably the wealthiest country in the world at that time. But
it was much poorer than any country today.

Warring States China in 400 BC was much poorer than that.

So no, no one has been "permanently crippled by colonization", and if they
had, draining the local swamps would still be well within their means.

~~~
Nasrudith
You kind of proved the point though because century time scales are involved
then instead of decades for the project. I would certainly call
"multigenerational when others can do it in one" crippled.

~~~
Avamander
But not permanently crippled.

~~~
zapita
As pygy_ explained above, colonialism has morphed into "neocolonialism through
private corporations and puppet governments". That is a symptom of the
widening gap in power between former colonies and former colonizers. That gap
is compounding over time, making it harder and harder for former colonies to
catch up. In that sense, the crippling effects of colonization are still felt
today, and are continuing to grow with no end in sight.

~~~
beat
What makes you think the gap is compounding? Is that fact-based, or feelings-
based?

I'd recommend reading _Factfulness_ , by Hans Rosling. It'll cause you to
rethink some things.

edit: Here's an interesting fact for you. In the late 1990s, the global
extreme poverty rate (around $1.80/day in today's dollars) was 29%. Today,
it's under 9%. We've wiped out two thirds of the world's extreme poverty in
twenty years. [https://www.gapminder.org/topics/extreme-poverty-
trend/](https://www.gapminder.org/topics/extreme-poverty-trend/)

~~~
zapita
> _What makes you think the gap is compounding? Is that fact-based, or
> feelings-based?_

What a strange way to engage in a debate. I already explained why I think the
gap is compounding. Feel free to offer a constructive rebuttal if you
disagree.

> _We 've wiped out two thirds of the world's extreme poverty in twenty
> years._

That is fantastic. How does it relate to the compounding power gap we’re
discussing?

~~~
beat
If you read _Factfulness_ , you'll find that it's not a strange way to engage
at all. One thing Hans Rosling proved and taught is that even well-educated,
caring, attentive people are incredibly wrong about simple facts about global
economics and health - so much so that, on his multiple-choice questions,
every group he examined performed _worse_ on their answers than if they simply
guessed at random.

So yes, "Is this belief feelings-based?" is an incredibly important question.

So how does the question of the rapid reduction of extreme poverty relate to
the "compounding power gap"? First, it shows that progress is being made, that
the poorest of the poor are doing much better than they were as recently as
two decades ago.

But more importantly, I do not believe you have demonstrated with facts and
evidence that there _is_ a "compounding power gap". You _believe_ that there
is compounding power gap, based on the fact that there is a power gap at all.
But actual, fact-based evidence suggests that power gap (measuring by dollars
as a proxy, since you didn't offer a standard of measurement for your power
gap) is decreasing, and rapidly. With some exceptions, the poorer nations are
increasing their wealth at a far faster rate than richer nations are.

Consider this chart:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_GDP_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_GDP_growth_rate)

It's a list of countries by GDP growth rate. I assume you're familiar with the
miracle of compounding, since you used that word.

The first European country on the list is Ireland, at 13. The next is Hungary,
at 40. The first former colonial power is the US, at 107, more than halfway
down the list.

If you don't think that economic growth is a reasonable proxy for "compounding
power gap", then what is?

~~~
zapita
You write very confidently, but don’t seem to have a good grasp of this topic,
so I’ll give you a few pointers.

First, don’t use yearly growth rates when discussing long-term trends. The
data is too noisy. Ten year averages should be your minimum for the topic at
hand.

Second, GDP is not a useful way to detect the ways in which former colonies
are crippled. There are several reasons, but just to name a few: it does not
distinguish raw materials from refined goods and advanced industries (why do
you think Lybia is on top of your list?); it does not reflect quality of life
or security; it does not reflect independence from foreign interests; it does
not reflect military power or the ability to influence global and regional
affairs. There isn’t a single metric which neatly reflects every dimension of
the problem (I never claimed there was), but as a starting point for further
research, I recommend studying the UN’s IHDI report. You can find lists of
countries sorted by IHDI. Another good thing to do is study the bottom third
of pretty much any sorted list of countries - by IHDI, HDI, any variation of
GDP or GDP growth - and ask yourself 1) “why are these countries in the
bottom?” and 2) “how likely are these countries to be in the top third in 50
years?”.

Third, study the role of Trans-National Corporations in the world economy. How
much do they contribute to the economic output of former colonies? To what
extent are they headquartered in former colonial powers? To what extent are
their profits, and capital gains realized by their shareholders, reinvested in
former colonies vs. colonial powers? Can you spot a compounding effect?

Fourth, for a different take on the problem, study the racial wealth gap in
the US, Canada and Australia. Study the development state of indigenous
nations within those countries. Can you guess the root cause of this state of
affairs? Can you spot a compounding effect?

Lastly, quoting from your favorite self-help book doesn’t make you magically
smarter or more convincing, just obnoxious.

I hope these pointers will help you in your quest for “factfulness”.

~~~
beat
And fwiw, I firmly believe that reading _Factfulness_ and absorbing its
lessons _does_ make you smarter. Enough so that I would buy you a copy, if you
promise to read it.

It's not weird to think a book can make you smarter, either. Assuming you
believe reading and learning in general make you smarter (I assume you do),
and that smart and engaged people are sometimes wrong (I assume you believe
that as well), then it stands to reason that a book dedicated to understanding
how smart and engaged people can believe incorrect things will make you even
smarter than before.

------
oxymoran
I have no issue with modifying genetics normally, but why in the world would
you modify a fungus to produce spider toxin? Fungi are far more advanced and
intertwined with the biosphere than most people realize. What if they escape
and run amok?

Why not just modify the mosquito which has been shown to work?

~~~
WhompingWindows
Why would they run amok? Does the spider toxin give them a survival advantage
relative to its energetic cost? If the toxin merely allows them to kill the
insects they infect, I believe it'd just tamp down the population without
downright eliminating it.

------
not_a_cop75
The comparison to historic disasters caused by the introduction of invasive
species can not be understated. Maybe the net positive is good, but there are
still negative effects as of yet undiscovered. It would be nice to find a
solution with only net positive, but we seem to live in a world of tradeoffs.

~~~
jvanderbot
Malaria is a leading killer of humans. 212 million cases in 2015 alone. 70% of
deaths are young children. (who stats)

Not to mention other diseases spread by mosquitoes.

Im down for trying.

------
ladyattis
The issue I can see from such techniques is the same issue with all pesticides
and that is are these species we've deemed pests necessary for the food web? I
know it seems silly but apparently mosquitoes are a major biomass source for
fish and other species which may not be easily substituted with a less
dangerous one. Maybe the more correct answer isn't killing off the mosquitoes
which feed off humans but find a way to eliminate malaria itself. I'm being
naive in my assessment, to be honest, but that's just my thoughts on the
matter.

------
CriticalCathed
Let's not go about creating fungi that kill animals en-masse.

------
bayareanative
If this works, GMO seem interesting but fraught with all sorts of unknowns.
Why can't a similar effort that cleared malaria from the American South after
WW2 be applied again, but on a larger scale (sans horrible insecticides)?
[https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...](https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.html)

~~~
lkbm
My understanding was that those horrible insecticides were the primary thing
that worked. The link you posted mentions about draining breeding sites, but
seems to be saying that DDT application was the biggest component: "It
consisted primarily of DDT application to the interior surfaces of rural homes
or entire premises in counties where malaria was reported to have been
prevalent in recent years."

------
afarrell
I wonder how much ecological damage is done by humans trying to protect their
communities from disease borne mosquitos.

I grew up with parents that urged me to prevent pools of standing water, but
don’t lots of non-mosquito insects need standing water to breed?

~~~
joecool1029
>I grew up with parents that urged me to prevent pools of standing water, but
don’t lots of non-mosquito insects need standing water to breed?

Sure, they can use the other pools of standing water not near humans. The
reason it works to limit some species of mosquito (mostly aedes aegypti) is
that they preferentially seek to bite humans and so live near them. Other bugs
seek out plants and other bugs so they can live elsewhere.

~~~
afarrell
There are more than 7 billion humans in the world and lots of agricultural
land is required to feed the ones in cities. How much land area is not near
humans?

~~~
SargeZT
Roughly half of the habitable land in the world is used for agriculture. Of
the remaining half, only about 1% is developed in any sense.

------
gwern
Fulltext:
[https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/editing/2019-lovett.pdf](https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/editing/2019-lovett.pdf)

------
mamon
Those mosquitoes are innocent, in fact they have the same right to live on
this planet as humans. Stop this mosquitocide!

------
duncanmeech
This is a fast way to kill mosquitos and an even faster way of creating toxin
resistant mosquitos.

------
kgc
Wait, but how many will be in the next generation since 13 survived?

------
BinaryResult
2 layers of mosquito netting is all that's keeping this from going rogue?
We're cool I'm sure nothing could possibly go wrong.

------
pHollda
, Kj.hhde

------
StanislavPetrov
>The researchers say their aim is not to make the insects extinct but to help
stop the spread of malaria.

Nothing ever matters less than your, "aim". Intentions are massively
overrated. What matters are the actual effects as measured in objective
reality. One of the many reasons society is the toilet that it is is because
so many judge initiatives and propsals on what they are "intended" to do or
what the "aim" of a proposed action is. The Inquisitor who burns you alive
because he intends to purify your soul is just as bad as psycho who burns you
at the stake because he wants to watch you burn.

~~~
bayesian_horse
The fungus they use is already widespread in nature. Their "version" is
probably less well adapted to nature than the "original", and should be out-
competed by the wildtype at worst.

But if I understand the article correctly, the fungus is quite deadly to
mosquitos, achieving "local" extinction quickly, which also stops further
spreading of the fungus.

------
ryanmercer
"GM fungus has mutated, hundreds of thousands of _pick one - wheat - ladybugs
- syrphid flies - bats - bees_ dying daily"

------
pvaldes
Lets put it simple, this is terrorism.

We talk about a plan to disseminate a potent lethal poison claiming moral
reasons. Not unlike releasing gas sarin in metro (for highly moral reasons
also, everybody has a good reason stuck in their head). Killing millions to
save thousands and so. The main difference here is that is a lethal stuff
regenerated constantly and released in the air at random days. Yup, this could
be worse than sarin attacks. Any fail would be permanent.

There are _dozens_ of spider poisons known that are weak or harmless for
people. They had choosen instead the poison that is worst... not for the
insects, the worst for us. The more efficient killing people.

And they plan to give this people's serial killer to fungi, to spread it under
the soil and into the air. Fungi kingdom is a poorly studiated group of life
beings, with a sophisticate defensive methabolism and a complex ecology.
Several species can associate and fuse into one (lichens) and two species can
be different forms of the same species; therefore there is some risk of
horizontal propagation of the modified gene to other species with
unpredictable comsequences.

Forget pot smokers, _this_ people should receive inmediately a visit from FBI
in their headquarters. They have a lot of things to explain, and I'm talking
seriously.

~~~
shawnz
I think you mean negligence and not terrorism

~~~
pvaldes
I can't help to wonder myself how they though that releasing in the nature a
creature able to synthesize venom of funnel-web spider was a good idea. Is
astonishing.

Are this organisations, supposedly full of smart people, so hierarchical that
nobody could point to the obvious elephant in the room? Even a child could see
it coming.

