The Ceaseless Uncaring

CRISPR is a gene editing tool. It’s still in its early stages but it can, or will soon be able to, genetically modify anything. It could edit diseases out of DNA. It could edit in resistances to certain things. It could potentially snip out mutations that cause cancer.

It’s already been tested on mosquito populations in Brazil and no one seemed to consider what would happen to the ecosystem when they did it and it fucked stuff up. They modified mosquitoes so that they would be sterile. The terminator mosquitos bred themselves out of existence and the remaining population that interbred but didn’t go sterile developed resistance to such methods and experienced population booms to even out the loss of the sterile mosquitos.

This can be very fucking dangerous if it gets into the hands of bad people - and it WILL. People that would want to use it on humans. Sure, it could edit out mutations that cause babies to be stillborn. On the other hand, what’s stopping someone from say.. sterilizing people that have the genetic markers for certain hair colors. Eye colors. Entire fucking races of people. It’s eugenics at the push of the button.

- I’m pretty sure it was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, but there have been people who’ve called to use similar mosquito gene drives in parts of Africa, without consent from locals. White-saviour complex or treating people as test subjects, either way, it’s Bad.

- It’s not just racism, but also ableism because there are still an awful lot of people who believe disability is oh-so-awful and would rather remove the variation in human experience from the population, instead of trying to accommodate it.

- monocropping has and will continue to fuck us up. Aside from financial fucking over of farmers, monocrops are vulnerable to the same diseases, which means that instead of losing part of a population, you lose the whole crop.

- if you can wipe out a species of mosquito, you can just as easily develop a bioweapon and destroy a crop.

I’m really excited for a lot of the wonderful things I could potentially do with CRISPR, but at present, we don’t have thorough enough guidelines, procedures, or enforced restrictions and we need to be cautious.

Sedlec ossuary, Kutná Hora (Czech republic).

Project Monsoon  Clever colorful street art that only appears when it rains

sm bg redraws!

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A snowflake in an avalanche doesn’t get to decide where it’s going.

You do.

“Blood Volume VII” by @joshuabeatsontattoo, via @creepmachine.