[Professor of Genetics at the University of California, Riverside Linda Walling’s] team is confident that a field release of their transgenic [crop pests] sharpshooters could be feasible within three or four years, once a series of stringent tests have taken place under controlled conditions—by which time they believe that regulations will be in place to allow the release.

In the context of wider public discourse around the ethical and safety risks associated with gene-editing animals—especially genetically engineering a specific set of genes to spread among a population—the team is already working closely with both growers and state and federal regulatory bodies.

This is a hot-button issue for society, and is threaded with debates along a number of axes: Concerns around the unintended consequences of changing an animal or an ecosystem; the question of “playing god”; and simply the sense that this could be the thin end of the wedge. As technology increasingly merges with biology, opening up ever more profound ways to engineer or co-opt the natural world, these issues are going to come increasingly into focus.

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