
Mosquitoes Genetically Modified to Crash Species That Spreads Malaria - amluto
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/09/24/650501045/mosquitoes-genetically-modified-to-crash-species-that-spreads-malaria
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snovv_crash
To all the naysayers: Did you know that there were massive DDT campaigns to
wipe out mosquitoes in Europe and the USA, which means you no longer suffer
from malaria in Mississippi or Italy? Italy was only declared malaria-free in
1970.

The proposed measures have much lower environmental risks than the DDT ever
did. Saying this shouldn't be used is effectively pulling up the ladder behind
you. Go to Mozambique or DRC, get malaria, and then use the same health care
the locals have access to. Hope to hell you don't have Cerebral Malaria (20%
mortality rate _with_ treatment). Then come back and complain about the
environmental risks of wiping out 1 of over 15 mosquito species, which
primarily feeds on humans anyways.

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godelski
> a technology that no one could say is safe definitively

Problem with this type of technology is that there is no way to even test if
it would be safe. You either have to just take the risk or not do it. And
unfortunately someone else will likely take the risk even if we don't. So it
makes more sense to me to try it and watch carefully.

BUT there is something that people aren't talking about much. This targeting
isn't "kill all mosquitoes" it is "kill the mosquitoes that carry malaria"
(Anopheles. Which are different from Aedes aegypti, which carry yellow fever,
dengue fever, Zika fever and chikungunya). So doing this to Anopheles
shouldn't affect the Aedes aegypti mosquito. So it is a tad safer than killing
_ALL_ the mosquitoes. But still potentially unsafe as other creatures may rely
on them as a food source more than currently believed.

It also begs the question, can we try this out on a specific species that is
far less widespread? Doesn't even have to be mosquitoes.

 _Disclaimer_ : Not a geneticist. If I stated something wrong please correct
me! And please provide source material so I can read it. Thanks!

~~~
mrfusion
Maybe some things are worth the risk.

We shouldnt sit around bioethicizing while people are dying of maleria.

~~~
beatpanda
Even if your premise is that we should prioritize human life above all else,
there's still a very good reason to consider the effect of eliminating any
species on the rest of the ecosystem before we just pull the trigger. It's
really easy to imagine a scenario where eliminating this mosquito ends up
being more harmful to human life than leaving it in place.

~~~
PhaseMage
You say it's easy to imagine bad scenarios. Then state them, with sources.

I've read the exact opposite: That it's hard to find any _real_ risks for
eliminating human-biting mosquitoes. I define real as killing near 3k children
a day.

[https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html](https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html)

~~~
gascan
Yes, here it is again, the nearly ten year old magazine article written by an
intern. Nothing could be more definitive.

~~~
toasterlovin
At least it's something. You're welcome to add some sources of your own to the
discussion.

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mullingitover
> "It could lead to other species coming in to fill a niche that are even more
> a problem," Steinbrecher says. "It's beyond our ability to predict what the
> consequences are, except that it could be really devastating."

Malaria has killed more people than all wars in human history combined.
Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, are going to die while we come up with
reasons not to do anything about it.

~~~
alwaysdoit
A. gambiae in particular is so strongly anthropophilic that it would likely
become endangered or extinct if cut off from all human hosts, so a widespread
bed-netting program would have likely the same effect, just slower and with
millions more cases of malaria in the meantime.

Any naysayers out there interested in volunteering for blood-feeding? Our
current approach of "make the poor people do it" isn't exactly fair.

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waserwill
This may lead to ecosystem crashes, but almost certainly not extinction. The
gene drive, here, relies on two major features: high reproductive rate of
mosquitoes, and the maintenance of the elements responsible for the drive.

First of all, geographically or reproductively isolated populations will not
be affected and will repopulate.

Second, the components of the drive may recombine, creating offspring that
will not be affected by the drive, and will out-compete the affected
individuals within two generations.

Needless to say, the number of mosquitoes (of this species) will plummet.
Perhaps, other insects, including mosquito species, will take advantage of
their absence. But given their ubiquity and population sizes, some will
survive. Maybe the genetic bottleneck that occurs will make them more
susceptible to disease, but that's minor.

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EamonnMR
If we're going to be making species extinct anyway, I don't see any reason not
to make wiping out the harmful ones a priority. Can we do Toxodendron next?

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thedudeabides5
Mosquitoes seem like they belong on the bottom of the moral weight spectrum,
above viruses and below bacteria.

~~~
azernik
None of the concerns I've seen voiced are moral; they're mostly worries about
unintended effects on the ecosystem.

~~~
gascan
But really, when has that ever happened before?

~~~
azernik
Unintended consequences of ecological interventions? All the time.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
This needs to happen as soon as possible.

According to the WHO
[http://www.who.int/malaria/en/](http://www.who.int/malaria/en/)

There were 216 million malaria cases worldwide in 2016 with 445 000 deaths.

Developing nations, especially in Africa are most severely affected by this.

Whoever, manages to eradicate the mosquitoes surely deserves the Nobel prize
in Medicine as well as the Nobel Peace Prize.

~~~
melling
What could go wrong?

~~~
brownbat
Well, it's worth asking. On the other hand, one rebuttal would go something
like:

P1. We should calibrate our tolerance for risk against the level of harm we're
addressing.

P2. Mosquitoes are at the high water mark for ongoing harm to humanity.

C. We should be more tolerant of risks here than against any or at least most
other problems in the world.

Another rebuttal would be that a survey of leading biologists and
entomologists leads to near unanimity that suddenly erasing mosquitoes from
the planet wouldn't really have any downsides on the larger ecosystem:

[https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/kill-em-
all/](https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/kill-em-all/)
[https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html](https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html)

To be fair, note that some rare arctic orchids might be affected:
[http://www.mosquitoreviews.com/mosquitoes-niche-
pollinate.ht...](http://www.mosquitoreviews.com/mosquitoes-niche-
pollinate.html)

If you want an updated review of biocontrol more generally, Outside/In has a
great episode about it, with interviews with proponents and critics of
biocontrol. One takeaway might be that there are a bunch of overlooked success
stories, and the widely popularized failures provide a really distorted
sample:
[http://outsideinradio.org/shows/s02e01](http://outsideinradio.org/shows/s02e01)

On the other hand, it includes interviews with critics of biocontrol as well,
so I feel like you could learn more details about both sides of the
discussion.

Other contrarian stories about invasives: [https://www.wired.com/2011/02/good-
invasives/](https://www.wired.com/2011/02/good-invasives/)
[https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/07/140724-inva...](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/07/140724-invasive-
species-conservation-biology-extinction-climate-science/)
[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/01/science/invasive-
species....](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/01/science/invasive-species.html)

If you want beautiful and complicated historical poetry about a human
intervention that lead to a population collapse, The Memory Palace will take
you back to the late 1800s: [https://player.fm/series/the-memory-
palace-110374/episode-13...](https://player.fm/series/the-memory-
palace-110374/episode-131-lost-locusts)

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godson_drafty
What about releasing a genetically altered strain of the malaria organism
itself?

~~~
hsnewman
Maleria reproduces asexually, so I guess it wouldn't work.

~~~
danieltillett
Malaria reproduces both sexually and asexually depending on its lifecycle
stage.

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_Microft
Is such an invasive method even needed? Malaria deaths are down by almost 50%
in the period of 2000-2015 according to WHO data.

~~~
godelski
This solution isn't about reduction, it is about eradication.

It is cost effective and also implies that you can do other things along the
same lines. For example, you could do the same thing to Aedes aegypti (another
mosquito species that carries thinks like Zika and Yellow Fever). You might be
able to do it to bot flies. Lone Star Ticks. Or many others.

~~~
bdamm
While I would love to see tick-borne disease wiped out, I just don't think
that wiping out ticks is the right way. Instead, how about wiping out the
parasites that are borne by these ticks?

It's a never ending cascade of special eradication. Today, ticks and
mosquitoes carrying life threatening agents. Tomorrow, perhaps rats, cats,
mice, sparrows, bed bugs, termites, and any other organism that we find
inconvenient? How about certain kinds of humans, perhaps we can terminate
people that are cognitively impaired? Wielding the rod of genocide seems like
a poor choice.

~~~
waserwill
The difference is that while animals like mosquitoes have many offspring and
are sexually reproducing, many of the microscopic parasites are not…

The gene drive requires sexual reproduction to spread and produce sterile
mosquitoes.

Huh, maybe this will open an opportunity for sex-non-obligate mosquitoes
infected by Wolbachia, if those are even produced by their interaction

~~~
bdamm
Your answer sounds like "because we can".

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beatpanda
I think a more interesting question than "should we do this or not" is "how
would you build a tool that could model an entire ecosystem?". Does anyone
reading this know what scientists use to do this currently?

~~~
ashtonbaker
I did a little bit of this for my masters project. Modeled ecosystems and
measurements of the ecosystem as partially observed markov processes.

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CitizenTekk
Poor parts of Africa, Asia and Oceania are the ones who suffer and getting
perpetually killed by this disease, not just malaria, even dengue, yellow
fever, etc which have may have cause by mosquito. Why it keeps happening is
that because they don't have really help from the Government about proper
health care and education on how and what to do to avoid this. People,
specially on poor status, mostly rely on their homemade or even herbal
treatment that we knew will not help them at all. Malaria is a curable
disease.

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fallingfrog
Just to play devils advocate.. what's the worst possible way this technology
could be used? What if you give the mutation to people? Maybe people you don't
like for some reason?

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a0-prw
This will clearly have a negative, long-term effect on the environment by
causing up to 400000 more human beings to reach sexual maturity in a part of
the world where expanding human population is _the_ major environmental
threat. _And_ , in the long run, a collapsing natural environment is also
going to cause tremendous human suffering and death. But never mind it's just
a drop in the ocean anyway, so go ahead.

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breatheoften
Could they develop another version of the gene-drive modification that undoes
the first effect? It seems like they should be able to do this and conduct an
experiment in the laboratory that proves that there is at least theoretical
ability to reverse the effect if it prove desirable to do so for some reason.

Seems like an achievable improvement on the safety model for this technique?
Maybe a necessary step before deploying a tool like this for the first time?

~~~
greeneggs
This is theoretically possible. Researchers have also considered creating gene
drives that automatically end after a certain number of generations.

It is a bit scary, but it is probably prudent to support such research, not
only for interventions like this but as a possible countermeasure against
biowarfare and bioterrorism using gene drives.

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sand500
This article talks about controlling Anopheles gambiae but something similar
already being done to control Aedes aegypti.

[https://debug.com/](https://debug.com/)

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alwaysdoit
A notable difference is that Debug is using the sterile insect technique
(SIT)[1], as opposed to gene drives, which are much harder to control once
released. With SIT, 1) we have a lot more experience using it for decades, and
2) it's pretty easy to simply stop releasing sterile insects if unintended
consequences were found.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique)

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rdl
I think this should be released without any form of government or popular
consent (i.e. don't even ask them); JFDI. We do so many worse things on a
regular basis with more concrete known negatives for far lower benefits.

~~~
justtopost
Well aren't we just a paragon of bad ethics.

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jekeeei
First they came for the mosquitos...

