Kevin Esvelt

If you can engineer a mosquito so it can't spread disease, you could engineer a mosquito so it always spreads disease.

Turns out it doesn't just let you engineer organisms in the lab.

It lets you let them go, and the engineered trait will spread to most of the ones in the wild.

That's incredibly exciting.

Malaria transmission requires humans and it requires mosquitoes.

So this is a back and forth transmission chain.

New Zealand government said, we're not sure of safety and so forth, so for now you're forbidden to import this virus into New Zealand.

And they smuggled in diced up infected rabbit parts from Australia illegally.

We know what happens when there's a backlash to technology.

We're seeing it right now for vaccines and other things.

And we saw it even in biomedicine with something like gene therapy, where a single death in a poorly planned clinical trial that led to tragedy set back the entire field by more than a decade.

More than a decade is more than 5 million dead children.