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Malaysia Releases Genetically Modified Mosquitoes
Blessed_by_the_Cow writes "Apparently, Malaysian scientists have released 6,000 genetically modified male mosquitoes into the the wild. These bloodsuckers have been altered to have shorter lifespans. The basic idea behind it is to help slow down the spread of Dengue fever by killing off the mosquitoes faster."
These bloodsuckers have been altered to have shorter lifespans.
Actually the modified Aedes aegypti in question are not bloodsuckers. From the AFP article:
In the first experiment of its kind in Asia, about 6,000 male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were released ...
Like Homo sapiens, only the females drain the life out of their victims. The male Aedes aegypti only feed on plant juices (but I'm guessing pass the short lifespan trait on more effectively).
Moderators, ball's in your court.
My work here is dung.
what could possibly go wrong?
How do they expect these shorter lived males to outcompete their wild bretheren? If the trait is to become sufficiently distributed in the population for this to make a difference then they would have to have some method of making them superior breeders to offset the shortened window in which to breed.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Well sure, this is clever and all... but I still prefer the shock-and-awe approach to mosquito control:
http://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_could_this_laser_zap_malaria.html
You can just f-fwd to the 12m mark for the craziness.
IANAGeneticist/Biologist, but... wouldn't evolution favor mosquitoes with longer lifespans? After a couple of generations, the weakened gene will get excised and the bugs will go back to the way they were.
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
My understanding of biology is not exactly advanced, but won't the normal mosquito specimens live longer and thus reproduce more often than the engineered offspring with shorter lifespans? Unless whole geographic areas were populated by the genetically modified offspring, I would think that this measure would be unsuccessful in the long run.
They aimed for shorter lifespans and got longer ones. In hindsight, they realized they must've put a decimal in the wrong place or something. These are not mundane details!
I won't go into whether or not releasing gm organisms into the environment is a good idea, I'll leave that up to people better educated in genetics. I would have to ask the question though, if these mosquitos have a shortned life span wouldn't it reduce the chance that they would have an opportunity to breed? Might it not have been more effective to introduce a gene that caused all male offspring to slow and inhibit breeding?
WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WR
This is a sig. It is like every other sig in the world, except that it is mine, and it is different.
This could be an interesting test of evolution in progress. One possibility is that there will be a brief period in which the mosquitoes have shorter life spans, but over time the introduced trait will be bred out of the species. Another possibility is that this will trigger a period of change in accordance with the "punctuated equilibrium" version of evolution. I find it very unlikely in any case that the shorter lifespan will become the selected trait, unless they continue to release such "modified" males in an ongoing fashion.
And here I was just trying out the programs from a generic ad-ridden website which produce high-pitched sounds (even those outside of hearing range) to see if they really would go away. I used to have it running on a notebook baco then, and if my memory serves me correctly, they should render the mosquitoes immobile. But now I still am seeing them flying about happily despite the program running. Crap, it had a stack overflow and crashed! Anyways, if the new breed has shorter lifespan, how should they survive in the wild? Or does it mean we have to keep introducing them periodically?
Democracy is for the people; you only vote once per season and we'll do the rest of the work for you don't have to.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKlkD-D20OI
If they are going to go through the whole effort of genetic modification, why not instead modify the species so the females also only eat plant matter, and eliminate the blood transfer problem entirely? The modified lineage would likely be able to outbreed the blood suckers just because the necessary resource is that much more plentiful.
Then again, any fiddling with nature can (and likely will) go awry, but I'm not sure this idea would be any more risky than the one they implemented.
They clearly failed evolution 101
Instead of modifying them for shorter lifespans, wouldn't it make more sense to modify them so that they, you know, don't carry dengue fever? Or failing that, modify them so that the females quickly die after first exposure to dengue? I'm not really sure that creating a mosquito that lives fast, dies young, and leaves a beautiful corpse really helps with the "not spreading disease" goal...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
What they really need is a genetic modification that leaves the male mosquitos essentially unaltered, but causes the females to have a shortened lifespan, ideally unable to reach sexual maturity. GM males would continue to compete with normal males for surviving females; each successful mating by a GM male would produce a new generation of GM males to continue the process, but all females of that generation would die before ever having a chance to bite a human or breed.
Dengue is not a human disease. It is a mosquito disease that affects humans. An infected mosquito transmits the virus to her offspring, so it doesn't matter how fast the "turnover" of the colony is, you will still have dengue carrying mosquitoes if the infected parent is allowed to lay eggs. I am assuming that these mosquitoes do survive to lay eggs, otherwise what would be the point of "releasing them" in the first place? In fact if anything, this could speed up the spread of dengue throughout humans (and mosquitoes) by increasing the amount of eggs laid/time due to the shorter life cycle and thus the population of dengue-infected mosquitoes. Someone hasn't thought this through. If you're going to play god, at least make sure you've considered all the possibilities (including the ones you don't like) first.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I know the comments so far follow the easy pattern -- either "what could possibly go wrong, lol" and "doesn't evolution kinda favor *longer* lives?" And I'm not entirely comfortable with human populations being used as guinea pigs for disease research -- cf. Tuskeegee et. al.
But Dengue Fever is some serious stuff. It's called "break-bone fever" for a reason -- the muscle and joint pain is debilitating, and lasts for weeks or months. It's one of those things that keeps poor communities impoverished -- each person infected requires care-giving, taking two or three healthy people out of the economy for every one infected.
There's no vaccine, and nothing on the way until 2015 at least -- like many tropical diseases, there's more money to be made from lengthening a rich white guy's m@nh00d than there is in lengthening a poor brown woman's life.
So as leery as I am of making random modifications to the DNA of an uncontrollable pest... I can at least understand the motivation.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Unfortunately, they all died before they could breed.
In California we release many thousands of sterile male Medflies at the first sign of an infestation. This has been remarkably successful in protecting valuable crops. The dollar value of these crops is well known. What is the dollar value of human lives and health? If that were clearly understood, perhaps more effort would go into eradication of dengue and malaria.
...omphaloskepsis often...
They are only 7 1/2' tall, and, furthermore they don't technically eat you they DRINK you!
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
They want to reduce the population, so they.....release MORE?!? Just kidding.
Umm, wouldn't a shorter lifespan effectively speed up evolution of the species in the long run? And in the short run, since females incubate their young in the ingested blood, wouldn't a shorter lifespan lead to more breeding and thus more blood consumption?
We know how this ends, a group of genetically enhanced mosquitos will break into the Malaysian laboratory leaving a trail of bodies while being pursued by Rick "The Flyswatter" Deckard.
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... sweaty white skin on the shoulder of a tourist... I watched bug lights glitter in the darkness at the Tannhauser Gate..."
What can possibly go wrong?
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
Well sure, this is clever and all... but I still prefer the shock-and-awe approach to mosquito control:
http://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_could_this_laser_zap_malaria.html
You can just f-fwd to the 12m mark for the craziness.
Dear sir or madam, could you tell me how much it costs to license that invention from Intellectual Ventures, the company of former Microsoft bigwigs? Why is no one using this technology? Could it be ... cost of licensing?
We all know that arthropod-borne disease is an issue. Not just dengue, Malaria, west nile, but things like VEE, WEE, etc are carried. HOWEVER, it is likely that the mosquito also carries a vector that transfers genes across ALL mammals, and perhaps across all eukaryote. These would be responsible for causing us to differentiate quickly. If we disturb this, then we may be looking at the actual in-breding of the human species, but possibly also of other species, leading to our eventual downfall.
Just because you CAN do something, does not mean that you should.
Windbourne.
Vince: "... Flamenco Dancers of Death. They would swoop down and carry off small babies in their beaks. ..."
Sheldon: "Their BEAKS! Mosquitoes with BEAKS!"
Vince: "... Their great wings flapping off into the sunset."
Malaysia Releases Genetically Modified Mosquitoes .... What could possibly go wrong?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I foresee lots of starving birds and bats.
The more generations you get in, the faster you get to adapt. This is shortsightedness at its worst.
I, for one, welcome our mosquitoes overlords!
--- Illogical Spock
When it was called "Jurassic Park".
With a shorter lifespan they should be able to evolve much quicker, having many more generations.
Does it worry anyone else that a "developing" country is releasing genetic experiments into the wild?
Malaysia may still be developing but they are not really third world either. Many of their scientists and engineers are world class and it shows in their approach to infrastructure development. Genetically engineering mosquitoes to deal with disease is a classic long term investment with a high payoff at the end.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
On the time scale for which your theory could be an issue we will most likely move ourselves into artificial environments, leaving mozzies behind entirely. Maybe this will stop us from evolving. More likely our direct genetic fiddling will take its place. Or we kill ourselves off and the original Earth habitat continues on and a different species starts making our mistakes.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
man, did you ever grudge-f*ck a good thesaurus with that one there, wow, hats off...
Developing != inferior to "US", that is what is wrong with most of modern worldwide thinking, "we" were once the top of the crop and no one could ever knock us down as "we" were innovating
but the problem is "developing" countries are hungry, so they take a popular "innovation" and mass produce it, sure "we" had the idea, but who gives a shit when everyone else is making money from it, ask atari
All I've been seeing lately are "shameful" attempts at humor... 99% of you are not funny. Can we be a little bit more srs plox. I'd like to have the ratio of humor-attempt/Intelligent go from 99/1 to at least 50/50. Stop wasting time, thanks.
Oboy! Quicker turnaround = quicker evolution = faster adaptation = ultra-super-dengue in a year or two. Yayyyy! What a neat little genocide!
Specially when some of those genes - via aircraft and shipborne importation - get into other countries and their yellow-fever carrier / lime-tick population. Evovled simian yellow-fever outbreak, anyone - in a global summer ? Hmmmmm?.
I'm just surprised that one could know enough about genetics and simultaneously understand little enough about evolution to think this effort was worth their time. Is it possible that this is a political feint?
Here's what they should do:
Find a mosquito in the normal population of mosquitoes that is genetically 'unfit". It flies slower, dies when it gets dengue fever, whatever. Then, they should clone this mosquito and release billions or even trillions of these genetically identical males every year. Eventually, the entire population would be genetically the same.
After this stage, you have several options. One would be to engineer a virus or bacteria that kills all mosquitoes of this kind. That could have been a factor in the choice of mosquito to clone. It would result in a 99% or so success rate, maybe even eliminating all mosquitoes in the area. You could even do this earlier on to lower the population and then, again, release your trillions of males doomed to die the next year, increasing your chances of having a monoculture of mosquitoes the following year. Those males would seek out any non-identical females left and pollute the next generation.
On the other hand, you could engineer an even less genetically fit mosquito once the first set became common. Over time, that kind of mosquito would become commonplace. More or less, the idea is to do the opposite of evolution and constantly select for the least fit mosquitoes.
One could (should) even do this to reduce the number of species of mosquito. Currently there are 3500 species of mosquitoes in the world. If we could reduce that number, we would make it easier to kill them. Using the above techniques, in areas where different mosquito populations are in competition with one another, we could tip the scales and eliminate the most genetically fit species in favor of the other one. In this way, we could over time eliminate the mosquito altogether.
John
The page appears to have been moved to http://www.popsci.com.au/2011/01/malaysia-releases-6000-genetically-modified-mosquitoes-into-the-wild/