Technologies that would bias the inheritance of a gene or a group of genes in a population have been discussed for decades.Such technologies, scientists have long proposed, could exploit translocation mechanisms to prevent, contain, and eradicate vector-borne infectious diseases, some of which are global public health emergencies. An especially interesting possibility was introduced back in 2003, when Austin Burt, Ph.D., an evolutionary geneticist at Imperial College London, described how site-specific "selfish genes," such as homing endo-nuclease genes, could be engineered to target new host sequences and skew population sex ratios.
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