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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

#81

Post by blisterpeanuts »

emeidi wrote: post #71

Unintended consequences, anyone? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences E.g. Rabbits in Australia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia#Biological...

There are always consequences, both intended and otherwise. It's best to go in with eyes open, having considered every possible consequence of our actions, and make a cost-benefit decision.

When human lives are at stake, notably the millions lost to malaria, dengue, and other mosquito-borne illnesses, the unintended consequences had better be pretty massive to make a difference.

Re: Brazilians welcome genetically-modified mosquito to help fight dengue fever

#82

Post by fractallyte »

danielweber wrote: post #74
emeidi wrote: post #71

Unintended consequences, anyone? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences E.g. Rabbits in Australia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia#Biological...

Simply saying "unintended consequences" means doing nothing, ever. WHO says "severe dengue is a leading cause of serious illness and death among children in some Asian and Latin American countries." After we don't have so many dead kids, some of them can grow up, and you can ask them how they feel about whatever unintended consequences there are.

Anthropocentrism does not answer the question...

Re: Brazilians welcome genetically-modified mosquito to help fight dengue fever

#83

Post by greiskul »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #79
ggreer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> First, the mosquito they're trying to eradicate is a non-native species. I really don't get the environmentalist emphasis on the world being, and staying, the way god ordained it at the beginning of the universe. Mosquitoes have a generation time measured in weeks; for any practical purpose, there's no such thing as a non-native mosquito. Assuming a mosquito generation length of one month, and a human generation le…

The distinction is important because it means that there probably won't be an ecological imbalance if we exterminate the mosquitoes, since there are no species that exclusively depend on them, or which they are responsible for keeping in check. When you eliminate a native species, the unintended consequences can be wide.

Re: Brazilians welcome genetically-modified mosquito to help fight dengue fever

#84

Post by gcb0 »

windsurfer wrote: post #55
gcb0 wrote: post #54

no they dont welcome it. it happens under they ignorant apathy. the region where that happens in brazil is our red neck equivalent. some politician just choose to spend a few millions on a british company (and recive the usual 10% back under the table as consultancy in the next year or so) instead of spending half of that in social programs that would have a permanent outcome instead of this joke. but since politics…

Do you have any sources? I, for one, welcome our new self-destructing mosquito overlords.

No i don't have any source because those policies are not discussed BEFORE. they are ADVERTISED AFTER the fact.

which proves my point. ...but i'm sure Veja will write a piece saying how nice that solution is. Even though every single person studying it already commented that trying to kill the mosquito is idiotic.

Re: Brazilians welcome genetically-modified mosquito to help fight dengue fever

#85

Post by gcb0 »

arjunnarayan wrote: post #17
rdl wrote: post #16

I wish the GMO developers had initially focused on products which were end-user or publicly beneficial like this, vs. just raising yields or reducing pesticide use (which are end user and societally beneficial, but can be cast by opponents as economic arguments). Without the existing anti-GMO movement, GMO would have a much easier time getting adoption in cases where it's essentially unambiguously a win (like this on…

"Just raising yields" has helped save millions of poor folk in third world countries from starvation. I'm not sure that pacifying first world leftist hippies should be the top PR priority of science.

most of the starvation in the world is because someone wants more profits along the way.

Re: Brazilians welcome genetically-modified mosquito to help fight dengue fever

#86

Post by Houshalter »

jimworm wrote: post #57

I've recently been thinking about the possibility of a genetic disease for mosquitoes, transmitted down male lines but killing only females of the same brood, with the intended result that a relatively small release of males can cause an extreme imbalance in the sex ratio and possibly the elimination of mosquitoes from an area. The different mechanisms of mosquito sex determination aside, I haven't been able to work…

Similar to a segregation-distorter. This occurs in some mice. The gene causes copies of itself to be present in all it's children by making them all one sex (male). The gene is highly selected for because it makes twice as many copies every generation than the alternative gene. And there is otherwise no difference between a male carrying the gene and one not carrying it.

If you released a gene like that on a species, soon there would be no females left and they would all die out.

Re: Brazilians welcome genetically-modified mosquito to help fight dengue fever

#87

Post by Houshalter »

robmcm wrote: post #65
jimworm wrote: post #57

I've recently been thinking about the possibility of a genetic disease for mosquitoes, transmitted down male lines but killing only females of the same brood, with the intended result that a relatively small release of males can cause an extreme imbalance in the sex ratio and possibly the elimination of mosquitoes from an area. The different mechanisms of mosquito sex determination aside, I haven't been able to work…

This would only work for a while, and then, "nature would find a way". Sometimes I think no one even bothered paying attention to Jurassic Park.

Not necessarily. Evolution isn't magic and lots of species go extinct. And evolution has never been optimizing for the survival of the species. It selects for individual fitness and sometimes even the fitness of individual genes.

Re: Brazilians welcome genetically-modified mosquito to help fight dengue fever

#88

Post by Houshalter »

hrktb wrote: post #12
icegreentea wrote: post #4

A 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) brou…

As mosquito related problems are just plain hard and in this context ther is no other viable solution, I also think the usual fear is less important in this context. But for the sake of the argument, the fact that this mosquito comes from Africa doesn't really matter so much, as the consequences of this operation could go from making it immune to this gene, make it mutate in a different/worse direction, or have the e…

I'm not sure if it's even possible to be "immune", but if it doesn't work oh well, nothing lost.

Changing the mosquitoes in any significant way is incredibly unlikely. Random mutations happen all the time in nature.

Re: Brazilians welcome genetically-modified mosquito to help fight dengue fever

#89

Post by thaumasiotes »

greiskul wrote: post #83
thaumasiotes wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First, the mosquito they're trying to eradicate is a non-native species. I really don't get the environmentalist emphasis on the world being, and staying, the way god ordained it at the beginning of the universe. Mosquitoes have a generation time measured in weeks; for any practical purpose, there's no such thing as a non-native mosquito. Assuming a mosquito generation length of one month, and a human generation le…

The distinction is important because it means that there probably won't be an ecological imbalance if we exterminate the mosquitoes, since there are no species that exclusively depend on them, or which they are responsible for keeping in check. When you eliminate a native species, the unintended consequences can be wide.

This makes the weird assumption that a non-native species will never occupy any position within the local ecology. Consider a (slightly unintuitive) case of an intrusion into a well-established ecology: maize into human society. Europeans came to America with a level of reliance on maize of exactly zero, since they weren't aware it existed. They brought their own grains. And we grow wheat here today. But... if we decided to completely eliminate maize, would there be any consequences for American society? Or for a case with more historical flavor, consider the introduction of the potato to Ireland. There were problems when the potato population failed.

More generally, if species I ("intrusive") arrives and replaces species A ("autochthonous"), why is removing species I more dangerous than removing species A would have been?

Re: Brazilians welcome genetically-modified mosquito to help fight dengue fever

#90

Post by searine »

jostmey wrote: post #5

The 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.

Which is exactly why no species ever goes extinct.

Oh wait...

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