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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...
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!
First malaria proof mosquito? I created one years ago.
*splat*
There's another.
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
Also, now they are a 1000 times their normal size.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
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'd also take out a very low level creature in the foodchain.
What the fuck do you mean "LOW", wetbar? Last I checked, we were eating you.
Signed,
The Mosquitos
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
I wonder where you've been in Mozambique... Costa do Sol doesn't count. I was a contractor in Manica province a couple of years back. I got malaria four times in one year. Every other international I knew contracted malaria. Mozambican colleagues were also infected often. We had treated nets, sprayed pesticides in our facilities, didn't let water stand, etc., etc.
It doesn't work. Maybe you can point to some percentage decrease in an area, but people are still getting and dying from malaria. Relying on individual action (treated nets, spraying own facilities) or an on-going effort organized by the government (a national spraying campaign)... recipe for failure.
I'm not saying we shouldn't take those kinds of actions-- any reduction is good. I'm saying that we should work towards total eradication of malaria. Ending poverty should put the material conditions in place, but maybe GM mosquitoes could help along the way.
Malaria harms mosquitoes too. An earlier attempt of this concept tried to outcompete factor and found that due to the added immunity the mosquito quickly rose to around 90% after a few generations. In theory, all they need to do is release this mosquito and it should have the immunity gene take over the vast majority of the mosquito population in short order and protect a lot of humans as a consequence.
Also, you can't really evolve past a defense if the wall is instantly 50 feet high. You need some leeway like not taking the full doses of antibiotics or a rather large quasi-species of HIV to have something in the works that kind-of works and then play off that. This makes the mosquitoes rather instantly immune and likely couldn't be evolved around, anymore than a deer could evolve a defense for a high powered sniper rifle that appeared on the scene rather suddenly in evolutionary terms.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
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
In Mozambique 2006, WHO reports:
22 Million Suspected Cases
7 Million Confirmed
19 Thousand Dead
Malaria instance rate went from 20% to 30% from 2001 to 2007
And here's my citation: http://malaria.who.int/wmr2008/MAL2008-CountryProfiles/MAL2008-Mozambique-EN.pdf
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?
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 *