Bold ideas in science research used to thrill us; now they seem pretty threatening. When I have written about the ethics of genetically engineered mosquitoes to combat malaria, many of my friends have expressed alarm. “What if it goes badly wrong?” they ask. What if there are unintended consequences that ripple across ecosystems? What if this is one of those technologies that cross the line from innovative to utterly world-destroying?

And yet, one could also ask, what if we do nothing? For that question, at least we have an answer. A report last week from the World Health Organization revealed that 597,000 people died of malaria last year, overwhelmingly children under age 5, and an estimated 263 million people were sickened. Thousands of families cradled a baby dying from a preventable fever; thousands of pregnancies ended in stillbirth or maternal death.

For a time in the early 2000s, it seemed that the world was gaining ground against malaria, but progress has stalled, cases have risen, and the hopes for its near elimination by 2030 have been scuttled. Global warming, armed conflict and lack of funding are all factors. And while new vaccines certainly will help, they are limited in their effectiveness. (They reduce the risk of severe malaria by 30 percent and require four separate clinic visits.) For much of the world’s poor, we still rely on the 19th-century technology of bed nets and insecticide.

For the past two decades, scientists have explored whether a new technology known as a gene drive might hold the tantalizing promise of eliminating malaria by targeting the mosquitoes that carry the deadly parasite. The reason the gene drive is so potentially revolutionary — but disturbing — is that it uses genetic engineering to introduce changes in mosquitoes that do not stop with one generation and are preferentially inherited by all future generations.

Scientists might use this technology to hatch more male mosquitoes (which do not bite) than females (which do) or to render the females unable to bite at all. Genetically altered mosquitoes would be released to mate with wild mosquitoes, passing along, or driving, these new traits and gradually reducing the population of the mosquito species that carry the deadliest form of malaria. Once released, the process would be out of human control. It is a bold idea.

All such powerful technology presents an ethical puzzle because it is impossible to predict precisely how it could reshape the world. My friends are right to raise questions. We have been betrayed by technology before. (Consider how the Industrial Revolution, the basis of modernity, has changed our global climate, making it hotter and wetter, driving malaria-transmitting mosquitoes to new habitats.) But given the realities in the W.H.O. report — the tragic, preventable deaths — not using all the ingenuity we have seems ethically irresponsible.

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But the move backfired in a way that few supporters expected. Californians in 2021 actually tossed nearly 50 percent more plastic bags, by weight, than when the law first passed in 2014, according to data from CalRecycle, California’s recycling agency.

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