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Concept

Gene drive

A silhouette of a person with a glowing orange DNA helix emerging from their head, symbolizing a gene drive concept.

A genetic element engineered to bias its own inheritance so that nearly all offspring of a carrier inherit it, rather than the usual half. Built with CRISPR, a gene drive can in principle spread an edit through a wild population in a handful of generations. Caged trials in Anopheles malaria mosquitoes have crashed colonies completely. No drive has yet been released into the open.

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