Comment by skosuri

The idea and implementation of gene drives have been around for a while since the development of zinc finger nucleases ~20 years ago. The issue has been they were hard to do. Now with CRISPR's it has been remarkably easier. Interestingly in drosophila, there is precedence for engineering other forms of selfish genetic elements such as P elements (transposons). We will see where the technology goes, but we sure do live in interesting times when it comes to the engineering of biology.