Ben Bradford

Just enough.

Yeah.

And so it turns out that there's a whole bunch of steps that you kind of have to follow if you're going to do this in a way where you, one, test that the thing actually is going to work.

And two, test that it's not going to work too well and go around the world and create a whole bunch of problems.

Well, you need an area where you're going to put out your mosquitoes into the wild, kind of a cordoned off area where they're going to be on their own.

And basically what we're describing is a mosquito Jurassic Park.

And then that leads to other questions, which is how do you stop what happens in every Jurassic Park movie?

And so, of course, this is the challenge.

And we know we're trying to avoid because we've seen it in history.

Take a tangent with me to the shores of Australia and New Zealand in the late 1800s.

European ships landed, bringing sailors and soldiers and felons and rabbits.

Europeans brought rabbits over for food and hunting, snacks and sport.

Of course, the rabbits quickly escaped and bred all over both islands and became a scourge on an environment totally unprepared for them.

They eat everything.

New Zealanders looked to fight back.

They brought over ferrets and weasels to sick on the rabbits.

And when that failed, ferrets and weasels became more invasive species.

Skip to the 1990s.

Neighboring Australia, largely by accident, unleashed an only partially tested biological weapon against its rabbits.

This nasty virus that wipes out like two-thirds of all rabbits or more.