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Mosquitoes Genetically Modified To Crash Species That Spreads Malaria (npr.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: For the first time, scientists have demonstrated that a controversial new kind of genetic engineering can rapidly spread a self-destructive genetic modification through a complex species. The scientists used the revolutionary gene-editing tool known as CRISPR to engineer mosquitoes with a "gene drive," which rapidly transmitted a sterilizing mutation through other members of the mosquito's species. After mosquitoes carrying the mutation were released into cages filled with unmodified mosquitoes in a high-security basement laboratory in London, virtually all of the insects were wiped out, according to a report in Nature Biotechnology. The mosquitoes were created in the hopes of using them as a potent new weapon in the long, frustrating fight against malaria. Malaria remains one of the world's deadliest diseases, killing more than 400,000 people every year, mostly children younger than 5 years old. What's encouraging is that the mosquitos reportedly did not appear to further mutate in a way that would diminish the effectiveness of the engineered mutation. "But the researchers stressed that many years of additional research are needed to further test the safety and effectiveness of the approach before anyone attempts to release these mosquitos or any other organisms created this way into the wild," reports NPR.
It worked well with cane toads in Australia.
They even provide entertainment for the locals, swerving their cars all over the road to see how many they can pop.
>> Why not just introduce another species to eat them.
You know how sometimes you read something kooky and you say to yourself, "wow, this person watches too many SciFi/spy/etc. movies."? (That happens a fair bit here on Slashdot).
This article is evidently a case of "wow, these people do not watch nearly enough SciFi/spy/etc. movies."
Oh well. I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.
That is of course something to be very careful about.
Because it is, multiple teams have studied the issue thoroughly and there seems to be broad agreement that eliminating the specific species responsible for most malaria would have very little ecological impact at all. There are plenty of other mosquito species (and other insects) to fill the niche. There are over 3,000 species of mosquito, only three (0.1%) cause most disease.
A key there is something like chemical pesticides wouldn't typically target just the species. Hence the search for a very targetted approach.
Well, no, it's a perfectly sensible thing to worry about. For example in Communist China, Mao encouraged everyone to wipe out sparrows because sparrows are a filthy nuisance and they eat crop seeds. So they did that, a government-driven program to eliminate sparrows. Yay, no more sparrows mucking the place up. Except, it turned out that sparrow ate a lot more insects than they did seeds, and after that China started to be beset with locust plagues which actually did wreck agriculture and millions starved to death. They then had to go over to Russia and buy sparrows to breed up and release in China to replace them.
Food chains are in fact pretty delicate things.
That's why they're aiming at a small subset of mosquitos rather than the entire family.
Mosquitoes are not a natural part of many food chains. For instance, before the arrival of Europeans, there were no mosquitoes in Hawaii. Same for many other islands in Polynesia.
If the mosquitoes in Hawaii were wiped out, it would be restoring the food chain to its more natural state, and would likely help native species against invaders.
By that the logic anti-vacation folks are the best thing ever. You are not being cold-hearted; merely following the good old “one rule for me, another for thee” hypocrisy.
One of the more popular explanations among economic historians for why regions of Africa are so underdeveloped is specifically malaria. You will notice that countries like Ethiopia that are located in more mountainous regions and thus suffer less from mosquitoes have also always been more developed. Plague and war completely wreck economic development, which ironically also leads to lower populations down the line for all cases studied to date.
As for Malthus being quoted here, cut him some slack. He lived a long time ago and didn’t sufficiently account for productivity growth.
"To accomplish this task, Chinese citizens were mobilized in massive numbers to eradicate the birds by forcing them to fly until they fell from exhaustion. The Chinese people took to the streets clanging their pots and pans or beating drums to terrorize the birds and prevent them from landing. Nests were torn down, eggs were broken, chicks killed, and sparrows shot down from the sky. Experts estimate that hundreds of millions of sparrows were killed as part of the campaign."
https://io9.gizmodo.com/5927112/chinas-worst-self-inflicted-disaster-the-campaign-to-wipe-out-the-common-sparrow
http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20061130_1.htm
If your or your neighbor's child dies of whatever, then you'll have 2 more just to make sure one survives. Thus why the birth rate is astronomical in places wracked by war/famine/plague/death. The push to eliminate malaria is in large part driven by the fact that doing so will cause the sub-Saharan birth rate to plummet. After lowering infant mortality rates, the next-best ways to lower the birth rate are female empowerment (enough to allow them to choose how many children they bear), sex education, then access to contraception (which is useless if you use it wrong because your instructor was a prude and assumed you would understand).
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Actually, people have thought carefully about the ramifications. Firstly, note that only ~200/3500 mosquito species actually target humans. Probably, not even all these 200 human-biting mosquito types carry malaria, and not all of those carrying malaria have that high risk of transmission. If you drive the specific malaria-carrying human-biting mosquitoes extinct, it's not unlikely that other mosquito species will naturally fill their void, and that most predators will happily eat other mosquitoes too. We could even help them on their way, by releasing "safe mosquitos" in the same regions where we release "sterilized mosquitos".
Secondly, note that for many species, mosquitoes are not as large a part of their diet as people think, it's more of an opportunistic food source since they're slow and stupid. For instance, while many species of bats eat a lot of mosquitoes, it only constitutes ~2% of their food, since moths are larger and more nutritious.
Finally, it's estimated that malaria has killed roughly half of all people that ever lived. And that's just malaria; the same mosquitos tend to spread dengue fever, yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis, Rift Valley fever, Chikungunya virus, West Nile virus, and so on. We should also ask how much damage to specific ecosystems we are willing to accept to save a ridiculous number of human lives.