Brazilians welcome genetically-modified mosquito to help fight dengue fever
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Re: Brazilians welcome genetically-modified mosquito to help fight dengue fever
#2Recent rabiolab episode on this subject: http://www.radiolab.org/story/kill-em-all/
Re: Brazilians welcome genetically-modified mosquito to help fight dengue fever
#3One of the best new applications of GMOs. Interestingly, Rachel Carson mentioned this approach in Silent Spring: https://twitter.com/mem_somerville/status/457876443586760704...
Oxitec is making the mosquitoes via GM rather than mutation but approach is the same.
Re: Brazilians welcome genetically-modified mosquito to help fight dengue fever
#4A common fear when deploying systems like this is that we are somehow tampering with nature, and that given our inability to predict outcomes, we should therefore err to the side of caution.
I typically agree with this line of thought. However, in this particular context, something to strongly consider is that Aedes aegypti isn't native to South America. As implied by its name, it's native to Africa. We (humans) brought them over to New World as part of the Columbia Exchange (likely in a slave ship... along with malaria, and yellow fever, and the disease in question Dengue fever).
Re: Brazilians welcome genetically-modified mosquito to help fight dengue fever
#5The approach may work a while. But then I am sure some mutant gene will eventually emerge in the wild-type populations that will inhibit the synthetic kill gene. That's how Nature works.
Re: Brazilians welcome genetically-modified mosquito to help fight dengue fever
#6I am not afraid of GM stuff, but does anyone else think this idea is potentially really dumb? What about everything that relies on these mosquitoes as a food source? I am not an expert... but trying to just kill off an entire species sounds like a TERRIBLE idea...
Re: Brazilians welcome genetically-modified mosquito to help fight dengue fever
#7I am not afraid of GM stuff, but does anyone else think this idea is potentially really dumb? What about everything that relies on these mosquitoes as a food source? I am not an expert... but trying to just kill off an entire species sounds like a TERRIBLE idea...
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Re: Brazilians welcome genetically-modified mosquito to help fight dengue fever
#8I am not afraid of GM stuff, but does anyone else think this idea is potentially really dumb? What about everything that relies on these mosquitoes as a food source? I am not an expert... but trying to just kill off an entire species sounds like a TERRIBLE idea...
And, as the article points out, killing off this one species may not even halt the spread of dengue fever:
"Then there’s the possibility that as Aedes aegypti mosquitos are killed off, other species will just take their place.
Phil Lounibous, an insect ecologist at the University of Florida, says getting rid of Aedes aegypti won’t necessarily solve the dengue problem.
'The so-called Asian Tiger mosquito is (also) very abundant all throughout Brazil,' Lounibous says, 'and it ... is also a vector of dengue.'"
Re: Brazilians welcome genetically-modified mosquito to help fight dengue fever
#9I am not afraid of GM stuff, but does anyone else think this idea is potentially really dumb? What about everything that relies on these mosquitoes as a food source? I am not an expert... but trying to just kill off an entire species sounds like a TERRIBLE idea...
The people behind this program aren't fools. They're experts who have given a lot of thought to this problem. Some basic points should alleviate your fears. First, the mosquito they're trying to eradicate is a non-native species. Second, said mosquito is the primary vector for Dengue fever, which infects hundreds of thousands and kills hundreds in Brazil every year. Even if this mosquito was native to South America, eradicating it would almost certainly help people.
It's interesting how support for this program decreases with distance from it. If this outbreak was happening in your country, hurting your family, killing your friends, I doubt you'd be so loath to support GM solutions.
A side note: 99.9% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct. Nature is not some carefully-balanced system. It is chaos and suffering on a scale we cannot imagine. The majority of wild animals live in a state of constant hunger, pain, and disease. Those with sufficiently complex brains live in fear of predators. Speaking of predators: We would be horrified to watch a man vivisect an antelope, but we pay to watch documentaries of lions doing the same thing. Apparently animal cruelty is fine when it's done by other animals.
Re: Brazilians welcome genetically-modified mosquito to help fight dengue fever
#10I am not afraid of GM stuff, but does anyone else think this idea is potentially really dumb? What about everything that relies on these mosquitoes as a food source? I am not an expert... but trying to just kill off an entire species sounds like a TERRIBLE idea...
It's an invasive species which IMO changes things.