r/technology • u/lurker_bee • 2d ago

Biotechnology Burkina Faso says no to Bill Gates’ plan of creating modified species of mosquitoes

https://africa.businessinsider.com/local/lifestyle/burkina-faso-says-no-to-bill-gates-plan-of-creating-modified-species-of-mosquitoes/xyk7xm8
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u/funone1990 2d ago

That's not what I said at all. I said: IF a plane had a one percent chance of crashing, you wouldn't get on it.

Luckily they don't! 1% is an insanely high risk when the impact would be sudden death. Nobody would fly if the risk was anywhere near that high.

In this analogy, GMO engineering is the plane. My position is it's going to be fine in 99/100 scenarios. But when it goes wrong it has the potential to be catastrophic.

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u/Obscure_Occultist 2d ago

So you acknowledge that there is less than 1 percent but still non-zero risk to flying an airplane, and you acknowledge that the benefits outweigh the infinitely small risk of flying to continue allowing planes to operate. Yet you refuse to give the same benefit to GMO mosquitos.

You don't know the statistical risk of using this method yet you assume garaunteed catastrophic failure if we use said method. Additionally, you automatically assume the absolute worse case scenario to the usage of said method despite previous applications of said method have never indicated that potential scenario even occuring. You are relying on too many unknown variables to come up with your conclusion. Its no different then running an experiment that has a 99% likelihood to fail but assuming it will succeed due to unknown variables purely on the basis that it's has a 1% chance of succeeding based on those unknown variables.