Dr Kevin Esvelt is an assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Sculpting Evolution Laboratory. An outspoken advocate of open and community-guided science, his research team is working with numerous island communities in the United States to solve ecological problems by engineering local populations of wild organisms. Dr Esvelt was in New Zealand briefly this week to attend a public forum at the University of Otago, organised by the Allan Wilson at Otago research group in partnership with the Biological Heritage National Science Challenge, on the topic of using gene technology to remove invasive predators, which is thought to be a promising option for New Zealand in its drive to remove invasive mammalian predators by 2050.