I haven't seen the paper. Was it referenced in this thread?
If you're just genetically engineering the mosquito to be unable to transmit the virus, I can't see the harm in it. But if you are releasing a virus to act as your vector for genetic modification of the mosquitos, then I would think that has the potential to veer wildly off plan
The paper is linked at the top of this whole thread. The technology could be used to prevent transmission or drive the mosquitos to extinction. Preventing transmission is harder because there are so many diseases to prevent.
Using a virus as a vector?
The highly mutable nature of a virus. It's been engineered to perform a specific function, and within some limits of mutation it will still perform that function. There's a wide range of further mutations that will perform no noticeable function, and then there's a small space where it might do something that no-one expected. I mean, let's not get all doomsday about this - viruses are mutating and changing and leaping species all the time. We never know what nature will do for itself and how those effects will percolate through ecosystems.
My strongly held view is that we should be not be engineering with vectors. I do and have for a long time believed that species engineering (such as with this proposed system, although I was unaware of it until just now) is the way forward.
When I was completing my Biochem major I used to dream about ways to engineer our pestilent species out of existence, rabbits, cane toads and carp. Although in 2009 CRISPR wasn't even published and most of my thoughts revolved around chromosome engineering and X inactivation schemes to wipe the males of the species out. Not surprisingly, I wasn't the first to think of it and there was some great research out on those subjects
Can you explain what the advantage of the gene drive system is here? Looking at the paper, I see "Cassette exchange progeny" was only successful 0.05-0.38% of the time (table 1). So they need ~10,000 flies to get 10 mutants. Then in Supp Figure 3 I see detection of the "modified" DNA in the WT flies, and Figure 1c shows a good proportion of WT flies (denoted as "+/+" in that figure) were infertile as well!
So it seems if we just select those pre-existing infertile mutants we can get the same effect as using all these gene modification and gene drive techniques. I don't see what the advantage is supposed to be.
Sorry for the long delay. I think the problem is you need to understand what a gene drive is to understand the significance of this work. Have a look at the second paper I linked to and also George Church's I link lower down.
What makes you think it is dangerous?