Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes • Hacker News Board

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#241

Post by acdha » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 8:52 PM UTC

ant6n wrote: post #83

Whatever happened to those mosquito laser zappers? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKm8FolQ7jw

According to an acquaintance who worked there, the original research was funded by the Gates Foundation’s anti-malaria R&D program. Intellectual Ventures developed the prototype Photonic Fence (http://www.intellectualventures.com/inventions-patents/our-i...) but concluded that low-tech things like bed nets had higher benefit per dollar for malaria prevention, particularly when you factor in the challenge of powering the device in areas without reliable electricity (the kill laser requires enough power to make solar non-trivial).

The good news is that they licensed it to a company for commercialization last year:

http://www.intellectualventureslab.com/invent/new-collaborat...

The business plan I'd like to see would be selling it as a luxury for the relatively affluent and use that sales volume to drive the manufacturing costs down. I live in Washington DC and it'd have to be really expensive compared to the cost of real-estate which is unpleasant to use from May to November due to mosquitoes, not to mention the growing number of people who will pay a premium not to spray pesticides around their children and pets. Diseases like Zika, Dengue, etc. should boost that even higher.

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#242

Post by sportanova » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 9:11 PM UTC

sirtastic wrote: post #233

sportanova wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, as long as it's poor black people and South Americans who cares?

Save a hand full of people while potentially dooming billions? I might not be getting your sarcasm but I'm totally okay with the current situation when the other presents the possibility of destroying millions of ecosystems which mind you would effect billions to trillions of animals, insects, and even people across the globe who are dependent on these functioning ecosystems. Killing off the primary source of food fo…

While potentially dooming billions - is anyone seriously suggesting that? Especially if you can target only a handful of the 3500 species.

> They introduce many diseases, much of which we developed immunities to and continue to successfully ward off naturally to this day

What diseases are you referring to here?

There are ~200 million cases of malaria a year and about ~500k of those are fatal. It's a debilitating disease and if it happens to the breadwinners it can ruin the entire family. Hardly a "handful" of people

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#243

Post by paulmlewis » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 9:12 PM UTC

lucaspiller wrote: post #208

robert_nsu wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dragonflies eat mosquitos. I happen to like dragonflies. The are one of the non-annoying insects I actually like to have in my (non) backyard. edit: http://www.chron.com/life/gardening/article/Dragonflies-Moth...

In the UK we don't have human-biting mosquitos, yet we still have plenty of dragonflies.

We have plenty of human biting mosquitos in the UK, I'm quite allergic to some of them.

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#244

Post by bryondowd » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 9:18 PM UTC

nickff wrote: post #162

jessaustin wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly the EPA screwed up, but the BLM should have promoted rather than jailed the bureaucrat who sold the feral horses. That program should be ramped up: it would be better for the horses and for the arid environment that they inhabit if the absolutely necessary regular culling resulted in nutrition rather than thousands of horses penned up to no purpose for the rest of their lives. It's not as though we're going t…

I have heard of equivalent 'screwups' described as horrific criminal actions, described as being done by greedy, stupid, and lazy people who should be sent to federal prison; but alas, those were private parties. My point was that catastrophic negligence goes unpunished when committed by a bureaucrat. Horses were native to North America, and existed on the continent before humans arrived; they were probably wiped out…

Not familiar with bison, but we do have the same issue with deer, as I understand it. We've driven out their natural predators, so they have a habit of overpopulating and eating their environment clean, then starving off. That's why we encourage controlled hunting. Keeps the numbers down to what they would have been if we still had wolves/bears around eating them.

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#245

Post by Razengan » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 9:20 PM UTC

hellbanner wrote: post #7

On reddit, I remember seeing something like "Research assures government that killing mosquitos would have no negative effect on world ecology"... right above another thread titled "Scientists underestimate ecological impact of species destruction"... Do we actually understand Mosquitos role in the planet's eco system?

Maybe it's just me but a swarm that goes around poking their needles into the bloodstreams of different species, seems like something that MAY have played a very important role in Earth's early ecosystems, like bee transferring pollen, but that role might be vestigial if not outright undesirable now.

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#246

Post by rmallol » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 9:29 PM UTC

There are other way to control the diseases. There's even a startup called AIME (http://www.aime.life) that focuses on using machine learning to predict the next mosquito borne disease outbreak. They claim to have pretty good accuracy too. The truth is though, that as the diseases mainly originate in "developing countries", no one seems care enough to even financially support them (not even YC). Still, they've made a lot of progress in the past months, even supporting the state of Sao Paulo in Brazil.

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#247

Post by Turing_Machine » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 9:30 PM UTC

astazangasta wrote: post #159

Turing_Machine wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, you're confusing wiping out the mosquito species with giving the mosquitos resistance to the malaria parasite. Those are two different things. Second, there is no reason that a CRISPR-based system is limited to a single target. Will you also lay $1,000 against a system that targets ten species-unique sequences at once? You're basically talking about curing malaria in mosquitoes. Neither I nor the article is ta…

> First, you're confusing wiping out the mosquito species with giving the mosquitos resistance to the malaria parasite. Those are two different things. You're the one who brought up CRISPR and gene drive. Perhaps you should read the actual paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/E6736.full ; you'll see that the proposal is entirely about giving mosquitoes resistance to the malaria parasite, not about eradication. T…

"You're the one who brought up CRISPR and gene drive. "

Which can be targeted to eliminate the mosquitos themselves.

"Perhaps you should read the actual paper"

The actual paper? Like there's only one? Hint: there's more than one way to use this technology, and more than one group working with it.

"On-target mutations are trivial to produce, and alleles segregate independently."

I think you're misunderstanding what "independently" means in this context.

If the probability of a mutation that will get around one targeted sequence is (say) 1 in a million, that's almost certainly going to happen, just because there are billions of mosquitos.

However, if you target (say) ten independent sequences, the probability of any one organism having resistance to all of them is going to be 1 in (1 million)^10 = 1 in 10^60 and that is basically not going to happen. It does no good in this case for one organism to be resistant with respect to one target, while another organism is resistant with respect to another target, because all of the targets will have fatal outcomes. The only way for the organism to survive would be for it to be resistant to all of them at the same time, from the beginning.

And there's no reason why you'd have to stop at 10, either.

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#248

Post by cpeterso » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 9:33 PM UTC

graham1776 wrote: post #182

Is there any website/service that allows US citizens to sign and send a pre-written letter to their congressman to address this issue, specifically pertaining to the Zika Virus and/or killing mosquitoes? Change.org campaign? My wife is pregnant now, we live in Southern California, and I feel fairly powerless to do anything except ask my wife to DEET up, be on the lookout for freestanding water, add screens, and pray.

DEET has its own health risks.

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#249

Post by saulrh » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 9:34 PM UTC

theptip wrote: post #185

saulrh wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amusingly, anthropophilia versus zoophilia is genetic. If we all cleared out of Africa completely, those problematic mosquito strains may well go extinct. Now I'm wondering how fast they'd re-evolve. So it's probably more like the case I thought of at the end of my first post, where we'd have to stamp the property back out every time it evolved. It'd be pretty easy, though, and without a major animal reservoir it'd p…

That's interesting; could another approach then be to use CRISPR to switch the anthropophilic species to zoophilic, and thus sidestep the "ecological destruction" argument that is the main objection to just destroying those species? I think a cost-benefit analysis supports gene-drive-based mosquito eradication, but this option might be as effective and more politically palatable.

You'd be forcing them into another ecological niche, where without additional changes to adapt them to their new diet they'd likely be outcompeted and die. It'd be a complicated and inefficient route to eradicating them just as surely as if you'd killed them all.

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#250

Post by __jal » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 9:40 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #238

__jal wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why, you get to decide. And I do. And everyone else. Just like we all chose whom to listen to. Turns out that people who study these things and understand the implications tend to be more listened to than, say, me, because I'm not an expert. But to explain a bit of the reasoning, as I understand it, invasive species are considered harmful to ecosystems because they tend to throw them out of equilibrium. If you introd…

But real world ecosystems are never in equilibrium, at least not for long. Even isolated ecosystems with little human contact and no invasive species experience boom and bust cycles. So we're actually just discussing the appropriate rate of change. How fast is too fast?

I don't think ecologists use the word the same way you do. I'm not an ecologist; I just used to date one. But I do know that equilibrium in the ecology sense is not static at all.

If I'm understanding your comment about the rate of change, I think you're talking about drift between equilibria.

Asking about "too fast" is where the human value judgement comes in. Which isn't invalid, it is just human-centric and far from the whole picture. Stating that introducing an invasive species can destroy the existing ecosystem is a statement of fact without judgement. It is just an observation of reality.