According to the World Health Organization, almost half of the global population is at risk of being infected with malaria. In sub‐​Saharan Africa, ten percent of children are killed by the disease every year and worldwide more than 500 million people are plagued by the virus annually. With all the advancements made in science and technology, malaria is still one of the most dangerous and difficult diseases to combat and eradicate from the face of our planet.

Malaria is transmitted by a specific species of infected female Anopheles mosquitoes known universally as ‘malaria mosquitoes’. Although males do not carry the virus, enough of the female Anopheles variety exist to pose serious threats to the human population. Though these mosquitoes are ubiquitous across all global climates, they are most prevalent in warmer regions of the world including parts of Africa, Central and South America, Southeast Asia, the Carribean, and the Middle East. With over 500,000 deaths attributed to malaria every year, developing genetic tools and new technologies that can tackle the disease is a top priority for scientists and gene hackers alike.

CRISPR‐​Cas9 (Clustered Regulatory Interlaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a gene‐​editing tool that gives researchers and scientists a sort of molecular scissors that can cut and replace one gene with another. By the early aughts of the 21st century, this revolutionary gene editing tool had been used to restructure the genetic code of living organisms. While genetically modified organisms (GMO) are created by introducing foreign DNA structures to an organism, CRISPR‐​Cas9 works by manipulating the genetic code of an organism itself. Dr. Emmanuelle Charpintier of the Max Planck Institute describes CRISPR‐​Cas9 in this way: “It’s like a kind of film strip. The person responsible can edit the fate and the story of a life of a cell, an organism, with this technology.”

In 2018, at London’s Imperial College, biologists Andrea Crisanti and Austin Burt succeeded in using CRISPR‐​Cas9 to wipe out a caged population of malaria‐​carrying mosquitoes. After only a few generations of breeding, none of the original mosquito offspring carried malaria. Utilizing CRISPR‐​Cas9, researchers had rewired evolution for one of the world’s deadliest diseases. With the technical problem of how to eradicate malaria‐​infected mosquitoes solved, researchers have now begun to question how they can make this a fixed trait among mosquito populations worldwide.

A gene drive is a technology that can increase the heredity of a modified gene in an organism. It is so precise in its execution that some are worried about the implications of making such generation‐​defining alterations to species. Harvard biologist Kevin Esvelt has been one of the leading researchers on the topic and he has warned about the potential of wild, uncontrolled gene drives that could quickly and irrevocably change a species forever. Furthermore, while gene drives can precisely edit problems with existing populations and perhaps rebirth extinct species, they might also be used to eliminate an entire organism with unforeseen consequences for entire ecosystems.

Many scientists, however, believe that gene drives will not create the sort of apocalyptic scenarios that have been speculated. They point out that gene drives only work in sexually reproducing species meaning that they can’t be used to engineer viruses or bacteria. Yes, it is true that CRISPR‐​Cas9 and similar technologies pose ethical, scientific and philosophical questions about the very nature of evolution as we know it. While we await the large‐​scale effects of these new technologies, developments in agriculture and biohacking are quickly changing the way human and plant biology functions.