This, says Guy Reeves, a biologist at the Max Planck institute for Evolutionary Biology, would be a radical and worrying leap forward in biotechnology. "They are almost instantaneous and they are extremely flexible," he says. Even putting the insects to one side for a moment – something he says is "virtually inexplicable from every angle"

– Reeves argues that there is real potential that this technology could be abused.

"When you look at every single step to make it agricultural, rather than a weapon, it's always easier to make it a weapon," he says. Reeves and his colleagues set out their concerns surrounding this Darpa program in an argument published in the academic journal Science.

"To break something, to knock something out, is much easier than to gain a function," Reeves says.

In other words, while the Darpa program is intended to deliver useful plant traits to a target crops, Reeves argues that the same technology could much more easily be used to surreptitiously damage or kill a crop.

Imagine you were the despotic leader of a nation state that wanted to damage the crops of a far-off enemy.

You could order the release of leafhoppers that carried a genetically-modified virus that, when transmitted to the plant, knocked out genes that were essential for plant reproduction, making its seeds sterile.

"Is only when [they] planted those seeds next year that [they] would see there was a problem," Reeves says.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/darpa-insect-allies-crop-editing