What if, with a wave of the wand, we could eliminate some of the world’s most devastating causes of illness and death? First, we might fight over which of our many maladies causes the most harm. Cardiovascular disease kills more people every year than any other, but it almost always develops over a lifetime: heart attacks may be sudden, but their causes are not. H.I.V./aids is another worthy candidate; it claims more than a million lives each year, and nearly forty million people are currently infected.
But my vote would go to malaria. Despite progress in reducing infections and deaths over the past decade, malaria still kills as many as half a million people a year, most of whom are under the age of five. They are invariably the poorest people in the world. Nearly two hundred million people become infected every year, and almost half of the planet’s population lives in areas in which the anopheles mosquito, malaria’s carrier, thrives. The global economic burden of the disease—including the impact on impoverished families from time lost at work, at school, and on the farm—is, as it has always been, nearly incalculable.
The magic wand is now within reach. It is called a gene drive, and it works by overriding the traditional rules of genetic inheritance. Normally, the progeny of any sexually reproductive organism receives half its genome from each parent. For decades, however, biologists have been aware that some genetic elements are “selfish”: evolution has bestowed on them a better-than-fifty-per-cent chance of being inherited. But, until scientists began to work with crispr, which permits DNA to be edited with uncanny ease and accuracy, they lacked the tools to make those changes.
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