First GMO Mosquitoes to Be Released in the Florida Keys
undark.org
undark.org
My personal context is that my grandfather was president of the Florida mosquito control board, who sprays enormous quantities of pesticides into nature in order to protect human health, and my mother, who works for the CDC on infectious diseases in sub-saharan Africa and South America.
The subset of disease carrying mosquitos are the most deadly disease vector to humans worldwide, and have no consequential energy contribution back to the bottom of the food chain. If you are worried about the food security of an animal or insect who only eats these disease carrying mosquitos, consider the magnitude greater number of insect species pushed near extinction or vastly reduced by our use of pesticides for mosquito control.
With this work, we move one step closer to being able to eliminate disease carrying mosquitos, leave the rest of the mosquito species alone, and finally stop spraying so much pesticide (that causes untold ecological damage) into nature and near human habitation.
While contrarianism is a valuable american (and human) trait, in this situation it is misplaced, mis-informed, and dangerous. An educated man's anti-vaxx, if you will.
Imagine the equatorial portions of the world without malaria, west-nile, yellow-fever, and dengue. Eliminating the largest amount of untold human and animal misery since the invention of anti-biotics, while stopping the indiscriminate use of devastating quantities of pesticides that destroy and distort ecosystems.
These diseases do not only kill, but physically main and mentally injure their hosts for the rest of their lives. In the developed world we are lucky not to have these issues due to pesticides, medicine, and a generally cold climate.
The equatorial countries are often impoverished, and the people who live there suffer from these diseases much more than we do. The contribution of persistent mosquito borne diseases to poverty is enormous and difficult to quantify.
I believe it is only from the most sheltered contexts and outlooks that one can oppose this measure of progress. If you oppose this test think twice - please reconsider. If your opposition is effective, people will die and suffer needlessly.
This is incorrect and reflects the general illiteracy of the population towards this technology. They are producing "gene drive" mosquitos, which contain a genetic element that restricts the sex their offspring, and the offspring of all their descendants, to be male. Gene drive mosquitos cannot breed with each other, because they are male, reducing the total number of mosquito offspring in the next generation, but they compete with unmodified males for mates, spreading the gene drive and exponentially growing their population and repressing the total population more.
People, even on hacker news, seem to think we live in a Spider Man comic book. From this thread:
"How long before we have lockdowns due to mutant strains of man eating mosquitos."
I lived in the Keys during the first attempt at this trial and there is so much wrong with it, we put together a whole website at the time. This page talks about Wolbachia, a safer and already approved alternative: https://neveragainkw.wordpress.com/2016/10/16/wolbachia-read...
Any mention of mosquitos in the Florida Keys should come with the disclosure that the FKMCD (Mosquito Control District) is the single best funded entity in the entire state of Florida. There is serious money to made here and Intrexon/Oxitec only has to sell to one customer at a time -- the District -- not the people who live there.
But isn't Oxitec only releasing males? Male mosquitos don't bite.
2. The Famous “Only Male Mosquitoes” Story
That may be the goal, but it’s not the reality. At best Oxitec can sort out about 99.98% of the females. That sounds terrific until you realize that even the Key Haven test requires releasing over 14 million mosquitoes. The company expects to be able to come 3x a week for 22 months to tend to the breeding containers.
Even the suggestion that the GMO mosquitoes are “bred to mate females” is misleading. In actuality, the GMO mosquito, crippled as it is by artificial DNA, does a poor job of mating. Unsurprisingly, wild type female mosquitoes don’t particularly prefer it. So Oxitec has to overwhelm the natural system with 5-25 times as many artificial mosquitoes as natural ones. The company’s tests in the Cayman Islands showed an effect on population only after massive, repeated GMO mosquito releases. The Oxitec GMO mosquito is its own Neverending Story.
https://neveragainkw.wordpress.com/2016/09/05/5-things-you-m...
It's of note that the project is so unpopular in the Keys that they have had to move from a Keys-wide trial covering thousands of homes to an opt-in only test with 130 houses. In other words, the people who live there don't want to be part of the experiment.
I'm still not sure I understand the problem. This entire experiment feels like a much safer version of the time the USA released a massive amount of DDT to end polio transmission [0]. DDT is obviously horrible for humans, but now we also live in a country without polio. There are costs to everything. Nothing is perfect.
Please provide better evidence than "having non-natural DNA in your blood is bad".
[0] - https://academic.oup.com/envhis/article/22/4/696/4057684
The potential harms you point out are tiny compared to the millions of lives ruined and hundreds of thousands of deaths caused each year by malaria.
I might be missing something..there are people dying of malaria in Florida?
Or you're saying that doing the test in Florida will help to get this technology to places where malaria is common?
Put another way, are there in potential benefits for the people living in the testing sites?
The submitted article mentions Zika in the first paragraph. So reducing Zika cases spread by mosquitos is one potential benefit.
There are only four species of mosquito that bite humans. They are a tiny part of the food chain, and would be completely replaced by other food sources.
It's also not the first time humans have successfully made this kind of intervention.
Here's an article from 2016 about the same thing (it even mentions Oxitec): https://slate.com/technology/2016/01/zika-carrying-mosquitoe...
(I believe it was posted to HN a while back, but the article stuck with me as we don't dare enjoy the outdoors here for fear of our child getting Eastern Equine Encephalitis: https://www.cdc.gov/easternequineencephalitis/index.html )
But that shouldn't really matter. We should fight for a system where obviously-good work can be done even if NIMBYs don't directly benefit from the work. If we're forced into we're forced into talking about how to placate/bribe Florida residents, then we've already lost.
And yeah, people absolutely do die from those, and even if they don't, they are horrible diseases that can produce long-term health effects.
The case fatality rate for yellow fever is 15-50% (I'm guessing strongly dependent on whether the victim has access to modern hospitalization).
https://www.who.int/csr/resources/publications/yellowfev/CSR...
[0] Source: https://www.seafoodsource.com/news/foodservice-retail/here-a...
Jesus Christ, millions of people have malaria, it's a life-ruining disease. This is some of the worst luddite nonsense I've ever read.
Can you back these numbers up?
I'm not going to ask you to prove a negative, but it sure sounds like it's going against all the advice I've heard about ecology.
Namely that ecosystems are far more complex than we understand and that even small changes can compound into larger changes. Basically: don't play God.
If this is safe and it does work, then it might be helpful to have some new messaging about when and where we can start actively designing ecosystems.
"Don't mess with mother nature" is easy to understand. So, how would you create a new maxim that preserve that general rules but also accommodates eliminating undesirable subspecies?
“We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” Stewart Brand.
Mother nature does not have your best interests at heart, and decisions that affect the lives of millions should not be made based off short maxims.
Anytime you jump from the lab to the real world it's going to be different. And each ecosystem in the country and state will be slightly different.
> if anything unexpected happens we can stop the process and reintroduce the species
Has this been done before with insects though? This sounds a lot harder than reintroducing wolves at Yellowstone that are small enough in number that they can be monitored.
I suspect the truth is that in both cases it comes down to who is going to benefit - with it more likely to happen if the "who" is either a large number or a small number with a lot of influence and the "benefit" is something that's immediately apparent to the winners and not immediately apparent to the people who lose in the intervention.
(Un)fortunately, we already are God. We already mess with Mother Nature. Our continued existence has impacts so complex that those impacts cannot be modulated solely in degree, because changing degree causes a cascade of effects that makes it a change in type.
It is unpredictable, not because it is natural, not because it is sacred or some other special case, but because of the number of parts. And in spite of that lack of clarity, we are inescapably responsible for making choices that will steer the ecosystem. As Sartre wrote,
> In one sense choice is possible, but what is not possible is not to choose. I can always choose, but I must know that if I do not choose, that is still a choice.
There is no surety that non-intervention will lead to outcomes that are better by any measure, whether that measure is long-term stability, convenience for humans, or nearly any other you might choose. Left alone, nature can only select the traits that made the last generation breed the most. None of that is proof against the future. For every species alive today, many others are dead, exactly because nature was not messed with. Nature does not share humanity's moral attachment to conservationism.
We have also introduced some species that haven't really created problems.
We have also created new habitats (cities) where some species are quite problematic. If we could get rid of cockroaches and bed-bugs, life would certainly become better.
This is only against Aedes aegypti that is responsible for most of the transmissions and is not a native specie of Florida.
If anything, wiping them out should push the local ecosystem back toward its normal state, as the native species of mosquito (of which there are many) would face less competition from the invasive Aedes aegypti.
Also, the fact humans have destroyed a lot of biodiversity already is no excuse to do so in the future.
Pandemics could be argued to be a biological control on population, but I think mosquitos would be of more naturally-recurring consequence that make it a "normal" form of population control.
Would you say the same about diseases and pandemics?
There are plenty of things humans do that sound suspiciously like "fucking with the firmware too much", but I don't think many would argue that eradicating polio or fighting cancer or HIV are bad things. And even the "side effects" excuse would apply here too, because letting those people pass on their genes to their offspring potentially interrupts the "natural ecosystem" and introduces weak links into the gene pool.
But there are plenty of good reasons for why this line of thought would not gather much sympathy or consideration these days.
For sure. Anything that we chip away in population control will end up having effects elsewhere in the ecosystem. I don't understand how that's a controversial statement. That doesn't mean we shouldn't but it also doesn't mean eradicating things like mosquitos is a good idea either. The same arguments have been given time and again when talking about genetically modified species of insects and animals; the variables of change are too high to predict how it will affect the world around us.
Imagine if all animals and all humans only died of old age from the dawn of time until now. Would Earth be able to sustain itself? I think not. Maybe biology has changed since I've taken it, but these things are considered pieces that are a larger part of homeostasis for ecosystems.
The last part of your statement is just generally confusing.
I’m not super comfortable with the unknown risks related to GM insects but having seen the impact of dengue first hand I hope this proves successful at limiting the insect population in urban areas.
Rabbits were introduced to Australia to get rid of other pests.
Then myxomatosis was engineered circa 1950 to get rid of rabbits. It killed 95% of them in 5 years. The 5% reproduced and now all rabbits in Australia have myxomatosis.
The researcher wanted to get rid of rabbits in his garden in UK. He brought myxomatosis back and 95% UK rabbits were killed in 2 years. The 5% regrew and all UK rabbits are myxo-resistant.
It spread to France. But I guess, by now, you know the story ;) Hence the story of the red-eyed rabbits.
I was quite surprised that people here chose to downvote my comment, apparently not knowing what it referenced.
Believe it or not, the balance of nature depends on them. What would dragon flies eat? What would endangered birds that eat dragonflies eat?
Some animal populations are _only_ constrained by their food supply and disease vectors in the environment. For instance, local deer populations, where human's have eradicated their predators, quickly spiral out of control unless hunting permits can be issued in number to keep the populations in check.
Eradication isn't a good goal, but perhaps rebalancing is and removing those that spread deadly cross-species diseases.
What are the risks of eradicating mosquitoes?
As you noticed, there are no keystone species in mosquitoes. No ecosystem depends on any mosquito to the point that it would collapse if they were to disappear. An exception may be the Arctic, but the species there are non-vectors and thus can be left alone.
Aedes aegypti are an invasive species in most of the world. It's a pure win to eradicate them, they have zero benefits to the ecosystem.
It's pretty hard for it not to be us when you look at livestock numbers. We slaughter 10s of billions of animals _yearly_ in the name of food.
Good luck with your pet issue I guess.
As others have stated however, mosquitoes have been studied to not have a significant impact if they were to go extinct.
Even though scientists state that this will be safe for our health and environment, they should still consider the community's voice because many people are doubtful about GMOs ' impact on our settings.
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you know more than others do, that's great! Please share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn. If you don't want to do that, that's fine, but in that case please don't post. Dismissive putdowns just make things worse, especially when upvoted to the top of a thread.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
The ecosystem is way too complex for us to understand. This might finish very badly.
No one's fussing much about the ecological impacts of getting rid of smallpox, polio, and guinea worm.
Sure, after purging hundreds of thousands of "counterrevolutionary" scientists and other intellectuals.
We're in a slightly different scenario now. Our understanding of ecological impacts from this sort of action is well advanced past that of Maoist China. It may not be perfect, but it's certainly better.
We can't look into the future to realize how much or little we actually know right now. You can only look back and remark on how foolish people were a few decades or centuries ago.
The only way to "undo" this I can think of is to introduce large enough swarms of natural mosquitos to overwhelm the population of GMO mosquitos. Now, you're worse off than before. So fingers crossed that it works. It'll be a great achievement though if it does.
Even if the ecosystem is too complex for us to understand now, that's not to say it's to complex to ever understand, and if we're ever to understand it, how should we go about that? Tests.
The human body was once considered too complex to understand. We may not know everything about the body, but we do know quite a bit, to the benefit of everyone alive today.
Caution is beneficial. Immediately discarding avenues of research and testing benefits because of incautious approaches of the past is not. This is not a case of people ignoring history repeating it, this is a case of people trying to learn from history and do it better next time, which is really the story of the human race.
Might this end badly? It's possible. None can say it isn't. Even if it does, I'm not sure that means this approach should be abandoned. The eventual benefit of what they are attempting, even if limiting it purely to what we might get from controlling some breeds of disease spreading mosquitos, is massive.
This is an act of eco-terrorism done by corporations. It shouldn't be treated better than oil spilling.
This is an absurd line of thinking. You can always make up some infinitesimally unlikely outcome for any action. The fact is mosquito-transmitted diseases are a real problem, the risks you are talking about are not.
There are many different ways and degrees of "badly". What you you thinking of when "ending badly" is mentioned? How accurate and likely is that an outcome? Is it based on knowledge of possible outcomes based on the science, and extrapolations, or on popular science and/or cultural depictions, or something else?
For many possible outcomes, we have real data. We have many cases of a species being removed from an ecosystem, and of a subspecies being removed. Some of those are because of humans causing extinctions (or near extinctions), some of it is from humans causing the removal of a species from an area, and some of it is from natural change in ecosystems that is not the cause of humans (the world is not static, species evolve, evolutions and natural phenomena such as weather patterns allow species to spread to new areas).
Look at how "cure for cancer gone wrong" is a cliché for causing undead monsters in modern times, how people missed the point of a Bond Villain plot creating a universal flu vaccine as cover for a plan to create a world devestating pandemic and concluded that a flu which contains all possible immune triggers to make a vaccine produce antibodies for all of them would be a hazard instead of a cover story.
Personally I am so goddamned sick and tired of the "Frankenstein complex" where any new technology is treated as a nascent apocalypse and "they should have known better than to make an axe because somebody would use it to cleave a skull" mentality.