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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

Other than movies, do we have any evidence that "GM offspring" (whatever that means, turns out defining "GM" is not as straightforward as one might suspect), are, in any way more likely to be dangerous than plain, vanilla, two-mosquitoes having babies offspring?

Because, here's the thing - we do know the implications of letting these mosquitoes live. 100s of thousands of people a year die. Every Year.

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Do we have any evidence that it won't?

If you believe the Monsanto GM corn documentaries, releasing GM into the wild may have bad effects (intended or otherwise) outside the designated population. Plants are obviously not the same as insects, but I would prefer to err on the safe(r) side.

Edit: Also, a known bad is often better than an unknown.

There are miles of difference between altering an organism so it'll survive better against predators or poisons, and altering an organism so it won't reproduce.

People shooting any GM advance on the same basket as if every change was the same irks me. It's similar to talk about how computer malware is harmful, thus you must never install anything on your PC.

The known bad is hundreds of thousands of people dying every year. It's pretty hard to conceive of how a laboratory tested solution which kills/slows down mosquitoes could be any worse than that, particularly when all sorts of genetic modifications are occurring by the billions in nature every single day without any testing/verification.

You know what would turn around everyone's attitude in about 7 days flat (probably fewer) - have those hundreds of thousands of people dying a year be white, rich, Americans. Every conceivable solution to wipe out the mosquitos would be developed, and rolled out with zero debate (and I mean zero - there wouldn't be a single naysayer of any merit)

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