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First 'Malaria-Proof' Mosquito Created
Gisg writes "The University of Arizona team reported that their genetically modified mosquitoes are immune to the malaria-causing parasite, a single-cell organism called Plasmodium. Riehle and his colleagues tested their genetically-altered mosquitoes by feeding them malaria-infested blood. Not even one mosquito became infected with the malaria parasite."
Speaking of which, why can't we just make a malaria-proof human?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
They need to be fitted with lasers on their heads to kill off all the other mosquitos.
it's called sickle-cell anemia...
People get so much less worked up about genetic engineering in bugs nobody likes...
And how would you make this variant of mosquito out-compete the normal, already established ones?
I'd hazard a guess that the simple, but probably more dangerous way would be to make these already transgenic malaria proof mosquitoes immune to some type of pesticide, so they'd have a selective advantage.
A somewhat safer, but far more expensive way would be to breed large amounts of the malaria proof mosquitoes and release them to just crowd out the normal ones.
Expensive because in addition to the raising a lot of them, you'd have to convince people to let you release large amount of blood sucking parasites near them. Other blood sucking parasites would get rich suing the pants off of that. And it's going to be an uphill battle releasing -any- transgenic organism into the wild. I think concern is entirely justified there as we have a poor track record managing the environment, but I could be convinced it's worth testing if we are reasonably sure it will just prevent malaria transmission. Artificially evolving mosquitoes to be immune to pesticides though would be extremely dangerous and seems like it has a good chance of backfiring if the genes for malaria immunity could be dropped but the pesticide immunity were retained.
You can guess which approach I suspect is going to be taken.
Yeah, this'll be great until we find out they're also immune to mosquito repellent and their desire for human blood has been quadrupled.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I'd go out on a limb and say it's not clear we need malaria-proof anything.
Spraying -- since the end of the civil war in Mozambique -- and distributing treated mosquito nets has greatly reduced Malaria in Mozambique and the lowveld regions of South Africa. Malaria was eliminated in Europe and the US without malaria-proof mosquitoes. (Remember that nasty DDT? It was intended solely for spraying the inside walls of houses in the south. Farmers saw how well it worked and started spraying it on their crops, and the rest is history.)
I really wish we could just invent a human-proof mosquito, one that can't stand humans.
SOME people do.
From my perspective the most visible people opposed to genetically modified organisms are the least informed. The people who dress up and scream about "frankenfoods" often are doing so out of uninformed ignorance.
Other people (like me) are concerned about this too, but don't parade around screaming government conspiracy about it. Maybe we tend to be a little more open minded about it too, making us reserve judgement until we get some indication as to whether it's going to have major ecological disadvantages that would outweigh the advantages such as making healthy food cheaper or eradicating malaria.
I mean, I personally make transgenic bacteria most weeks, so not everyone who is cautious about GMOs are raving anti-science zealots.
Alternatively, maybe we're hypocrites. I'm guessing we'll get called that and more by extremists on both sides.
First look at the breeding rate of all the different species we've driven extinct. Then compare to the reproduction rate of mosquitoes. Also compare the food sources and available habitats.
Problem with driving mosquitoes extinct is that they are among the (relatively) few species on the planet that can live almost anywhere we can, and regards us as food. It also only takes a few of them surviving, and then with their reproduction rate they're back very quickly in that area.
I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but it's be a bitch to do and there'd be a lot of bykill that we don't really want. It'd also take out a very low level creature in the foodchain.
GENERATION 667: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation
The funny thing is we have been genetically altering plants since the time that botany started being recorded. Matching the perfect set of plants for pollination is also a genetic modification, as is all the cross-breeding of plant species that people have come up with over the last few thousand years.
"But this one goes to 11!"
It's a good thing that parasites aren't known to evolve quickly.
It's not so much that I'm afraid of GMOs in themselves, I'm much more afraid of Monsanto owning the rights to my food.
There was a farmer around these parts, somehow had some modified canola enter his field (via wind blowing pollen or..?) and Monsanto sued him for "license fees" on his crop. Think he ended up not having to pay after a few appeals, but the patent was upheld.
The other problem I recall hearing is that often the modified plants are less hardy than the natural version, so if your seed is contaminated it will no longer grow as well *without* roundup. I'm not entirely certain on this one though.
The whole concept of owning a strain of plant that can spread easily, and being able to extract license fees on it, seems very rotten to me, though.
Sent from my PDP-11
Maybe it's just me, but after reading for seemingly months about some seriously stupid studies being conducted, I finally come across one that seems to be worth every penny we would ever spend on it. Malaria via mosquito is a HUGE problem in certain parts of the world.
It's about time we stopped pissing money away, trying to figure out why water is wet, why alcohol in excess makes you think you can sing, or scientifically proving the whole chicken vs. egg thing (sadly, that last one is an actual study)...
Don't put words in my mouth. I share their concerns. Raving lunatic extremists of any movement are stupid. My point was that they shouldn't reflect poorly on the movement as a whole.
The complete removal of mosquitoes would be nice but there would be add on effects.
... , maybe for their next trick these researchers can try and eradicate the gene that make people so intolerant of world views that don't match their own.
Many other animals (humming birds and Dragonflies to name two) eat mosquitoes. If mosquitoes get wiped out it would likely cause problems for those other species, sure most of them would just eat more of the other insects in their diet but then those might get pushed into extinction which would further impact the predators. And a few of those that rely near exclusively on mosquitoes might be more important to human survival than we currently know. I'm not a biologist so I don't know how reliant other creatures are on mosquitoes and their predators.
Another factor that needs to be considered is the other animals that also get malaria, it doesn't just affect humans, and what impact that would have on their populations, some rodent may have a population explosion, eat all the grain in the fields and you get a famine that ends up killing more humans than the malaria did.
I think that before they let this moded bug into the wild they need to answer a few more questions about how its going to impact the environment.
As to the hippies
It's not so much that I'm afraid of GMOs in themselves, I'm much more afraid of Monsanto owning the rights to my food.
I'm personally more concerned about things like unforseen health effects of consuming GMO, GMOs becoming invasive species, gene transfer from crops to pests creating super invasive species, and becoming dependent on monocultured food stocks leading to blights and starvation.
Monsanto being monsanto does make some of those things more of an issue. They're a lot more cavalier with risks than many organizations would be, and they certainly are doing all they can to press the monoculture, but there are plenty of big risks that don't have anything to do with patents.
The difference is that if you selectively pollinate one strain of plant with another strain of the same plant, you end up with a combination that could have occurred in nature.
Same with genetic engineering. Sure, it might take a while, but horizontal gene transfer does occur. And what can happen in nature or not is wuzzy too. What about species that cross, but extremely rarely, like apples x pear crosses, or Burbank's strawberry x raspberry cross? Or crosses between species that would never meet without humans, like the various black/raspberry and grape crosses that have parents from Old & New World species? Not that that matters, because what happens in nature is irrelevant. Glasses, vaccines, and chemotherapy don't happen in nature either. An appeal to nature is meaningless. Plants don't care how a gene got there, if by a particular gene came from breeding, a natural mutation, a mutagen induced mutation, natural horizontal gene transfer, or genetic engineering, or whatever, they just act on what's there.
With genetic engineering, you can modify organisms in ways that no amount of selective breeding of existing plants could have produced.
Not necessarily true. Every trait arose via some mutation somewhere, and I find it dubious that it could not happen again, given time. You may need evolutionary amounts of time, but it can be done.
The funny thing is that you believe these two scenarios are comparable in anything more than the most superficial sense of "yeah, something was modified by human activity" with no regard for the magnitude of the modification or whether it could have occurred without human intervention.
Sure, we have to be more careful with one than the other, but the principle is still the same, even if the process is different. Ever heard that old story about Churchill, the one where he asks a woman if she will sleep with him for a million pounds? She says yes, and he asks if she'll do it for five, and she asks him what type of lady she thinks she is. He replies, 'My dear, we have already established that, now we are just arguing over the price.' No one has a problem with breeding across species, or selecting mutations, or eating something that is just the product of a billion year old strain of mutant bacteria (that's everything). Compare the diversity of crops we've used extensively, like apples, melons, tomatoes, grapes, or corn, with something like jaboticaba, cassabanana, mauka root, safou, or teff, and tell me we're not playing with tons of altered genes. We've already established that all the forms of all the crops we've created over the years are ok, in principle, this really is just one more step, and in this case, you're only working with one gene at a time, not the half genes of each parent. Genetic engineering is just one more tool. Again, yes, it's more powerful, and with power comes responsibility (and if recent events have shown anything, it is that we can't always trust companies with that power), but the end result is still a plant with altered genes.
Speaking morally or ethically, it's already backwards from how it should be. A farmer can grow natural crops near another farmer who raises patented Monsanto crops. The wind blows and cross-pollination occurs between the two fields. If any legal action is to happen at all, it should be that the farmer growing natural crops can sue Monsanto or the other farmer for failure to contain their customized crops, as they are an unsolicited and unwanted invasion onto his private property.
And can I sue you if your standard hybrid corn cross pollinates my Country Gentleman or Blue Jade corn? I've never heard of that happening, why should it be any different for GMO pollen? That opens up as many cans of worms as Monsanto suing you for 'stealing' my trait.
So, we a
Funny you mention Africanized bees, because that was just conventional breeding. With absolutely anything, be it new biotech or techniques we've used for thousands of years, there is the potential for unforeseen side effects and unknown unknowns. Without some sort of omnipotence, you can't know every possible side effect that might come about. For example, look at the combustion engine. After years of usage, now we are told it is causing global warming. How could people at the start of the Industrial Revolution have foreseen this? Should we have expected them to never put the fossil fueled combustion engine into use because of what might happen? It is impossible to know what exactly each and every outcome of our actions may be. The smallpox vaccine could have some sort of complex, as of yet undescribed, intergenerational effect that could wipe out hundreds of millions tomorrow, and you can't disprove that statement. GMOs could do the same thing, either in terms of human health or ecologically, and you can't disprove that statement either. That's why the argument isn't 'Prove that there will never be a problem.' The argument is 'Sufficiently prove that there are no foreseeable problems.' And really, it isn't even that, the argument is 'Is the damage they cause (if indeed they do) less than the damage that agriculture will cause without them?' And in the meantime, the evidence we suggests that they are beneficial, so should we forgo those benefits in fear of a potential, but merely hypothetical, problem?
Invoking evolutionary time doesn't help. Actually, it's similar to your Churchill anecdote in some respects.
Leaving aside the historicity, there are a lot of questions begged by your story, and I'm going to ask you to walk through some of them with me.
What is the intent of the story?
If it is not apocryphal, what was Churchill's intent?
How was the woman raised? What are her circumstances? I'm personally of the opinion that women should not sell themselves for any price, but I am not particularly anxious to insult a woman just because she sees a difference between a million pounds and five. And there is a difference in many contexts.
If you absolutely insist on getting laid, five pounds will get you laid in some neighborhoods, 500 pounds will get you laid in others, etc., and in some places it takes a marriage contract.
For example, clock a byte register through all it's possible values. That's fast. Now do it randomly. It will probably take a bit longer, true? But if you have a statistically random sequence generator, it will probably not take too much time. Probably, if the generator has true statistical randomness.
How many effective bits are there in a mosquito's genes?
That's that part that's similar to your anecdote. You are assuming, when you invoke random permutation as if there were no time limits and as if mutation were the same as permutation, that five is as good as a million.
With only 59 effective bits, even at a strictly linear count with one permutation a second, you exceed the expected life of the solar system.
Now, I know you're going to claim that this is not the same problem, that we are picking relatively small strings in the genetic sequence, and that the changes are neither sequential counting nor random. But you are not asserting nature mimicking us, you are asserting coincidence between the processes.
Now that you're thinking, remember that nature works in parallel, but remember also that there is a selection involved. Some of the random stuff gets suppressed before it actually goes live, so we are not talking full permutation. And we don't have docs to tell us which combinations will be suppressed. Well, we can calculate some of the suppressed stuff, but we really don't have enough evidence to be sure of the calcuations that we can do.
The assumption that all possible permutations of a gene sequence will occur eventually is not equivalent to the assumption that all possible mutations will occur, okay?
By the way, remember that nature lopped off the dinosaurs.
Are you realy okay with saying, effectively, that it ought to be okay with everyone if our genetic experiments end up lopping humans off the evolutionary tree a little early? Is a million years not too early for you? How about five years?
Defeat a high powered sniper rifle is no different that defeating wolf's teeth: it would be prohibitively expensive to defend against them directly, so it's all about avoidance. This mean, stealth and detection of predators (including humans). And for that, deer are equipped moderately well -- and evolution _will_ make them better at spotting hidden humans pretty soon. Just give it time, hunting rifles are a quite new invention.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I don't know.
It seems to me a bit like trying to eliminate spam by engineering internet users who aren't interested in sex or money.
Bad analogy -- they're not changing the humans, they're changing the mosquitoes. So it is rather a bit like infecting spammers with some disease that makes them lose their interest in money, but doesn't endanger their target... And put it like that, it seems like a measure we all can support!
Mammal most likely to explode would be the one who has the largest population in Malaria regions already, is most susceptible to infection and has the highest mortality rate from infection.
That would be human beings.
Whether or not a further homo sapien population explosion in Africa is something you consider a good or a bad thing may be debated by some (batshit insane) people. Personally though, I reckon this is one case where advocating population control through birth control is probably better than advocating it through mass infections by a parasite that causes perhaps one of the most painful deaths in nature.
PS. Writing as somebody who has actually HAD malaria. Fortunate enough not to have had a resistant strain. I live in Africa (though I no longer live in a Malaria region, I grew up in one).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Some people have speculated that the population explosion in African and Asian countries is caused by high mortality rates. When parents need children for farming, working, or for dowries -- and when there is a relatively high risk of the child dying before puberty -- people opt to have a lot of children to ensure that they survive to be productive.
I'm not saying I believe it, but one has to be careful in assuming that a decrease in mortality will necessarily mean an increase in population.
You should believe it.. It's the main reason family sizes have shrunk in modern civilization - the need to have many children to do these activities has diminished, thus the need to have many children has diminished.
It might seem bad, or not politically correct, to think this way but if you look at family sizes over the last 1000 years in first world nations you will see the trend.
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.