Already, several groups are looking into the possibility of harnessing gene drive for conservation. Genetic Biocontrol of Invasive Rodents, or GBIRd, is studying the use of gene drive to rid remote islands of rats and mice. (The group is a consortium of organisations that includes North Carolina State University, Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization and New Zealand’s Biological Heritage.) Scientists in New Zealand are researching the use of gene drive to eradicate invasive wasps, and scientists at Michigan State University are investigating the possibility of using gene drive to control invasive sea lampreys in the Great Lakes. In Australia, it’s been proposed that gene drive could be used to reduce or even eliminate feral cats. Though all of these gene-drive-for-conservation projects are now in very early stages, it seems likely that, in coming years, at least some of them will prove to be workable.
The idea of using gene editing to preserve natural systems seems, from a certain perspective, crazy. What could be less natural than a creature created in a lab? And the perils of releasing gene-edited organisms – particularly those equipped with gene drive – are clearly enormous.
But at a time when the border between the natural and the humanmade, the wild and the synthetic, is becoming increasingly blurred, gene editing animals to protect them – or to protect other species from them – may become increasingly appealing. Already, researchers at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York, have produced a genetically modified American chestnut tree that’s resistant to chestnut blight, the fungal pathogen that, in the early decades of the 20th Century, killed off nearly every chestnut tree in North America. (The modified tree contains a key gene borrowed from wheat.) The tree has been submitted for federal approval, and a decision is expected sometime in the next year or so.
As for “assisted evolution”, such efforts, it could be argued, were already underway long before the term was invented. The American Chestnut Foundation, for instance, has been working for decades to create a blight-resistant chestnut tree via conventional breeding methods. These trees would be hybrids – American chestnuts crossed with Chinese chestnuts – and so, they, too, would contain genes from two different species, albeit closely related ones.
As Kent Redford, a conservation consultant, and Bill Adams, a professor of conservation and development at Cambridge, put it in their forthcoming book, Strange Natures: “The idea that conservation must protect what is ‘natural’ is understandable.” However, “the distinction between what is natural and what is artificial no longer provides a sound guide to thinking about people and nonhuman life”.
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This article was originally published by Yale e360, and is republished with permission – read the original story here. This is also why this story does not have an estimate for its carbon emissions, as Future Planet stories usually do.
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