Word: malariae
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Jacobs-Lorena and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University have taken a different approach to combating malaria. They have engineered a mosquito that produces an extra protein in its gut, which blocks the malarial parasite from infecting it. The team recently discovered unexpectedly that one of their engineered mosquito strains is “fitter” than ordinary mosquitoes. Once you infect it with a certain strain of mouse-borne malaria parasite, it lives longer and produces more offspring than infected wild-type mosquitoes. Place equal numbers of the two types of mosquitoes into the same cage...
What would happen if these newfangled mosquitoes were released into the wild? The hope is that the modified mosquitoes would out-compete the existing ones, and the bulk of the mosquito population would be malaria resistant, thus preventing new human malaria infections. It’s not beyond the realm of possibilities that the engineered mosquitoes could entirely replace the wild ones. This solution would be simple and inexpensive. It would not rely on vaccinating entire human populations nor spraying pesticides to control mosquitoes. It would use mosquitoes to fight mosquitoes...
...flight. The mosquito species that Jacobs-Lorena used is not the most harmful of mosquito species and the parasite used does not infect humans. Furthermore, the modified mosquitoes only have an evolutionary advantage over infected mosquitoes, and in the wild only a small fraction of mosquitoes are infected with malaria...
...more important question is a scientific one. We need to ask if adding a new gene to every mosquito on the planet will have negative consequences that outweigh the decreased transmission of malaria. The short answer is that we don’t know—we need more research and larger-scale experiments—though we do have a little experience in wholesale genetic modifcations...
Forming and operating such a body may be difficult—the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is evidence enough of how easily scientific decisions can become politicized. But it’s worth thinking about now. If a bigger, better malaria-resistant mosquito arrives next year, it would be a tragedy of epic proportions to spend years arguing about who should deliberate its release. We don’t yet have the magic malaria bullet, but we can think about human institutions in the mean time...