9.1 An engineering challenge
On July 30, 2020, NASA and its collaborators launched the Perseverance rover on a 292,526,838 mile journey to Mars. The following February, they dropped the rover into a 4-by-7 mile target near the edge of Jezro crater. This feat of engineering demonstrated, among other things, that the mission’s engineers understand a thing or two about gravity, thrust, and inertia.
![The Perseverence mission. Credits (clockwise from upper left): NASA / Joel Kowsky; NASA / JPL-Caltech; NASA; ESA / DLR / FU-Berlin / NASA / JPL-Caltech](images/hw-arithmetic.010.png)
The rover’s mission was to search for signs of ancient life, but on March 16 it paused for a selfie in front of Mont Mercou:
![Selfie at Mont Mercou. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS)](images/pia24543-1-16.jpg)
If we understand genetics and evolution as well as we think we do, we should be able to do something analogous with living organisms. We should be able to:
Scientists have succeeded at this challenge using multiple strategies. Here we consider a strategy implememted by Kyros Kyrou, Andrew M. Hammond, and colleagues. Working with a laboratory population of Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes, these scientists initiated a mutagenic chain reaction caused by a gene drive.