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RE: Bill Gates, Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes, and Houston

in Threespeak5 years ago

Wow, Bill Gates funding genetically engineered mosquitoes with foreign partners. If you can genetically engineer mosquitoes, what is to stop bad actors from using this technology to deliver a deadly virus to certain regions of the country? I doubt they would bother to get EPA permission. This technology should be outlawed.

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"This technology should be outlawed."

First, evil overlords genetically engineering plagues to decimate humanity aren't going to obey laws against it. Who would?

Law abiding researchers, who have no interest in destroying free society, but seek ways to prevent it. It is notable that in 2014 the US put a moratorium on funding gain of function research in highly transmissible viruses, yet the USG continues to fund dozens of labs around the world to do so, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology work that focused on altering bat coronaviruses in exactly the ways SARS-CoV-2 seems to be novel from other coronaviruses.

Today CRISPR is done on table tops across the free world, and ordinary people are availed the tools to genetically engineer organisms lawfully. Are good people that follow the law the threat you want to prevent?

No.

Will legislation actually impact evil terrorists and mass murderers to keep them from undertaking such horrors?

No.

It's not legislation that continually limits the freedom of good people who follow laws that can ever keep them safe. It's the understanding and tools they gain by the freedom to learn and advance technology themselves that can enable them to keep them safe.

Guns don't kill people, and neither does CRISPR or research. Criminals commit murder, and there's long been laws against that. If legislation prevented evil, there'd be no evil.

Edit: perhaps you might consider limitations on governments releasing such vectors into the wild, or allowing corporations to do so in their jurisdictions. If evil overlords seek our harm, they certainly use government and corporations to do it today.

Just leave free people the freedom to protect themselves.