Gene drive modified mosquitoes offer new tool for malaria elimination efforts | Hacker News Reader

Gene drive modified mosquitoes offer new tool for malaria elimination efforts

imperial.ac.uk

31 pointsgmays61 comments

Gene drives scare me. Being able to forcibly propagate a gene through a population seems like a strong candidate for causing an ecological disaster.

Slightly off-topic: Has anyone good recommendations against mosquitos? I hear UV traps are ok, but not perfect. And of course I have used the anti mosquito sprays. They don't last long though and I don't like the smell.

Not the prettiest thing in the world, but:

Get a cheap box fan, cheap mosquito netting type material, and duct-tape.

Cut the netting to size and tape it to the fan so that anything that goes through the fan gets caught in the net.

Put it in shaded places - bonus if its around doors.

Mosquitoes are not strong flyers, and when hunting or looking for a place to rest will get sucked in and can't get out.

I've killed - without exaggeration - thousands doing this.

Not a silver bullet (what is?) but as part of a defense-in-depth strategy this is insanely easy - and kind of fun.

n.b. I've been hospitalized with west nile - this is fun :-)

This is absolutely the way. And mosquito weather tends to be fan weather anyway!

Works pretty well for ventilating enclosed spaces, too—just make sure the fan points inward, pumping positive pressure into the space, so there’s a steady outward flow from the rest of the door/window/whatever.

I have some friends who live in the Houston suburbs. They bought one of the CO2-based mosquito traps. Seemed to work.

Although it's absolute hell on plastics, DEET is incredibly effective as a mosquito repellent. At least in the US, you can buy 99%+ pure DEET at Home Depot.

It goes great on salads

There are pest control companies that will fog your property which supposedly reduces the mosquito population. I'm skeptical though that me paying for the service will make a difference unless all of my neighbors do as well.

I can't find it now, but I remember reading about a person that used a box fan, some type of mesh fabric, and dry ice to create an insect trap that was apparently catching pounds of bugs every week.

Yeah growing up in the Florida Keys, our county did this on a county level. They used to use DC-3s to fly super low and fog the entire island but it was found that the pesticide was bad for fishes so they switched to truck based fogging. As as a kid I loved seeing the DC-3s because it would mean relief from mosquitos for a long time.

Picture of DC3 flying basically at roof top height: https://keysweekly.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/FKMCD-2.jp...

[Edited to include picture.]

It's hard to imagine people being okay with actual chem trails...

I can't believe we would get fogged by those planes as we waited for our school buses. It would sting our eyes a little bit but then it was fine and all the mosquitos were dead. It's probably okay... I hope.

Passenger planes still get fogged on landing in some countries, with flight attendants walking the length of the isles with insecticide spraying out.

On the move 20% picaridin repellent works well to almost completely prevent bites. It's also slightly more long-lasting than DEET and doesn't destroy plastics. It will still need re-application if you're sweating. Otherwise long sleeves, repellent on hands and a net over your head work well. The general rule is to not stand still for more than a minute - CO2 accumulation will draw in exponentially more of them. If you have to stop, look for a place that is naturally windy like ridge or a forest cutting.

At home / in camp, obviosuly put nets everywhere and turn off interior lights when opening doors. If there aren't too many mosquitoes UV traps can make things bearable, but if you're near standing water at dusk you'll still get eaten alive.

We've had good luck with Mosquito Dunks, both in natural standing water sources and in dedicated "trap buckets" filled with water and vegetation, but you have to do it early in the season as the dunks only affect the larvae.

Last year I came across a water-filled stump that was teeming with larvae swimming around in it. Dropped a piece of a dunk in, came back 24 hours later and the water was clear.

Mosquito nets are best: put some as canopies above beds and enjoy sleeping without the dreaded ear buzz. If you live in a badly infested area, put them around doors / windows (there's retractable ones, you can fit them yourself). And finally, the superpower of just doing things: do some door to door / enlist your neighbors and hunt down the neighborhood stagnant waters.

> do some door to door / enlist your neighbors and hunt down the neighborhood stagnant waters.

Thats a good idea but don't think that by covering few neighbors you are covered - they can easily fly 5km depending on species if they have reason or get carried by wind. And all you need is ie one old tire laying around on the ground.

This is one topic that Florida man knows better than most: a propane powered fogger was super effective when I was growing up in Florida. They would also do this as a public service where trucks operated by the county would drive by and fog entire neighborhoods. I don't know how ecologically sound this is but it is effective.

I have had better results with Picaridin based repellents than with DEET. Picaridin does not have the same oily feel that leaves my skin crawling after repeated applications. It also seems to do a better job dissuading our local variety of horse flies which will bite you right through clothing.

The tennis racket style zappers are effective and pretty fun!

the noise is pretty hard to stomach

The smell can be pretty bad too

I find that having a fan working in the room helps a lot. It's not foolproof, but it helps in certain situations.

The biogents traps are really effective. We have one without CO2 on our property and it works amazingly.

The idea of using gene drive on mosquitoes has been circulating for at least 8 years. [1] In that time, something like 4 million people have died of malaria, many millions more have been infected, and it is significantly impacting the economic growth of Africa. What will it take for us to pull the trigger on this?

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnzcwTyr6cE

This idea is much more than 8 years old. If my memory serves, achieving this via gene drive was first proposed in the 1980s, by using "transposable elements". If you'd like to learn more check out the following, only 25 years old (I think it cites the earlier work):

James, A. and Handler, A., editors (2000). Insect Transgenesis: Methods and Applications. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL. ISBN: 0849320283

Creating the right effector gene, and attaching it to a transposable element (or some other gene drive system) as the Imperial researchers and colleagues have apparently done is only one part of the battle. Getting this to spread in nature from introductions of mass-reared mosquitoes.. well that will be a big challenge also. To say nothing of the permitting as you mention.

The press release is remarkably devoid of any technical information on what they have accomplished.

Yep, the idea is older, I have vague memories of reading about it ~twenty years ago, but that video was the first thing I found in google so I went with that rather than overstate the case based on memories.

That is a cool idea. Like the mouse that takes the thorn out of the lion's foot: we could cure mosquitos of what ails them (even if they don't know it ails them, as they are carriers - but they die more so for being that), and the mosquito could become the friend of humanity.

I take it you have never spent any time outside where there's lots of them. If you go out without protection, they'll mercilessly sting every bit of exposed skin. Depending on your genes and the mosquitoes', the stings can swell heavily. Some of them sting so deep that you cannot get rid of the itching and inflammation with a heat pen.

As soon as you stand still, you'll find yourself in thick cloud of the bastards within 20 seconds. If you use repellent (picaridine does work to keep them from stining but isn't exactly healthy), they will still buzz around you and slowly drive you mad. If you use netting, some get through the inevitable gaps and some will obviously get inside your tent/car/house when you open them.

The sound of thousands of them flying around you just triggers some primal revulsion. Around sundown, their activity gets so intense that it literally sounds like a drone, if they're a large variety it even sounds a bit like a distant hornet swarm.

All in all, I don't think we can become friends. But at least they're more pleasant than black flies and deer flies.

There are few things that set me off like hearing that telltale Doppler effect buzz whizz by my ear. Not as bad as those flies you mention for sure but still awful.

I wonder if the unintended consequences would be tame enough to justify using a gene drive to breed human predation out of mosquitos.

If I could get a vaccine or some other treatment that got my body to not itch from their saliva, or even to just itch for a more limited amount of time, I could handle the rest (deadly disease excepted).

Sure, they're annoying, but I don't actually care about them sucking my blood that much. I have plenty of the stuff, they only take a tiny amount, and they feed birds and bats with it.

Having to spend hours afterward physically uncomfortable certainly tempers my magnanimity.

Have you ever considered an electrified paddle? I’d recommend the kind without a guard, just bare wires… the SNAP! when you contact a mosquito is both humane (instantaneous explosion!) and extremely satisfying, as these things go…

Not useful for meaningful control in the kind of swarm situation you describe, but cathartic! And useful for the stragglers who sneak into your shelter behind you…

> and the mosquito could become the friend of humanity

i'd rather not have them suck my blood even if there is no disease risk

> and the mosquito could become the friend of humanity.

This is impossible.

One night in the northwoods of Minnesota will quickly and completely disabuse you of this fantastical notion. I would make all mosquitoes extinct at great personal cost, if there was a way to do it. Being disease vectors doesn't even have much to do with it. They are the most profoundly irritating bug, with zero redeeming qualities. They make large swathes of country difficult to exist in during dawn and dusk. I cannot express in words the depths of my hate for mosquitoes.

Maybe they are feeding on your hatred? I don’t get a bad itch from them. Long sleeves keep them away. A broad brim hat with gauze to shoulders keeps them off your face. The noise doesn’t bug me. “Tis the sound of dusk”

This is great. Mosquitoes are ecologically important pollinators. They’re also the worst human disease vectors.

I do wish, though, that they would consider modifying whatever protein mosquitoes inject to make me itch so bad… Looking forward to seeing this play out.

I think the problem is that the protein is an anti-coagulant, which is necessary for mosquito's feeding strategy but is also something you probably want your body to have a pretty robust reaction to and break down/expel pretty aggressively, lest each bite just keep bleeding well after the mosquito finishes feeding.

Would for sure be nice if the immune response could skip the itching part though.

This is nonsense perpetuated by wanna be naturalists. Disease carrying mosquitos could just cease to exist and we will be fine. This topic has been discussed countlessly even here.

Hmm.

Why is anyone talking about gene modification then?

Serious question.

Why not just get rid of mosquitos?

If you can't just get rid of them, it's unlikely that you can modify the genes of all of them.

If you can introduce something to modify the genes of all of them, then you can introduce something to eliminate them all as well.

It seems that elimination is actually easier. Or at worst just as easy. What is it we gain from gene modification?

> Why not just get rid of mosquitos?

Because its harder than it sounds: LOTS of effort goes into eradication, whether by large-scale environmentally destructive methods (literally draining the wetlands where they reproduce), toxic methods (spraying poison over areas they reproduce near human populations, which also means over humans and water used by humans), or trickier methods lkke releasing masses of sterile male mosquitos to mate unproductively with females to reduce the number of productive matings.

But these efforts are usually less than complete successes at the best of times, and have gotten worse over time as—as the article here notes!—“Efforts to prevent the spread of the disease have been complicated by existing malaria interventions becoming less effective due to mosquitoes developing biological and behavioural resistance to insecticides and barrier-based controls.”

> It seems that elimination is actually easier.

It sounds like someone has never tried elimination.

A huge focus of gene drive manipulation of mosquitos is to force their populations to extinction.

The male is created with an X chromosome that will destroy any other X with which it is paired, leaving only other male progeny with the hostile X.

This goes on for a few hundred generations, driving the female population to zero.

There are grave moral questions in this, but eventually the technology will reach those who decide to deploy it, perhaps against the general will. It is only a matter of time.

Ask Africans if they would be against eradicating mosquito born diseases. It is very easy to speak from your comfortable home. I have strict opinions about this one issue; we need to forget about ethics, morality and take calculated risk and wipe out disease carrying mosquitos.

Yes, I agree that this is obvious. When it is accessible in these regions, it will be used.

Because historically genociding a species carries a lot of baggage. It's not something you can intellectually reason someone into believing.

That's not actually the reason—eradication efforts have not been avoided on this basis, indeed, mosquito eradication has long been a central pillar of efforts to control malaria. The reason for trying something else is that eradication efforts have rarely been completely successful and mosquitos are getting better and resisting them from the reproduction pressure imposed by the massive, sustained efforts at eradication, not because eradictation is something people want to avoid because “genociding” mosquitos is seen as undesirable.

If that's not the actual reason, then why do people keep discussing the moral implications of mosquito eradication?

https://unherd.com/2018/09/commit-mosquito-genocide/

https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/ethicsproject/teaching-resour...

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35408835

https://time.com/4319137/so-should-we-just-kill-them-all/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/09/13/what-would-hap...

https://www.livescience.com/what-if-all-mosquitoes-died

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK585176/

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/8/13/20754834/mosquit...

Idk, 7 articles over 10 years isn't very strong evidence of a raging debate

Surely this isn't the totality of all discourse on the subject.

I do not even think it is morality actually. It is just that citizens of western countries would absolutely like to see these mosquitos eliminated from their countries. It is just that they are against eliminating them in Africa, Latin America etc. In the name of being “concerned about ecological impact.” of doing so. Once global warming accelerates and some of those diseases such as dengue and zika become prevalent here in America public opinion will magically change haha.

Well you can count this western perspective as being in favor of mosquito elimination from the entire planet.

I hesitated adding an eight link. Alas, it was too few.

People discuss lots of things, without those discussions being significant influences on policy.

Avoiding mosquito “genocide” has not been a signficant source of policy restraint on eradication efforts, a fact that many of those “discussions” you cite bemoan, but have had no substantial effect in changing.

> Mosquitoes are ecologically important pollinators

Source? Because the research I’ve seen for disease-causing mosquitoes says nope [1].

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/466432a

>Without mosquitoes, thousands of plant species would lose a group of pollinators

I encourage all to look up what a gene drive is - find replace all mentions of 'mosquito' with 'human'. This makes a nuclear bomb look positively provincial - all it would take is one disgruntled post-doc. Only by the grace of god...

I just looked it up. The process involves modifying a fertilized egg or embryo to create a founder organism. The gene drive is designed to be inherited by more than 50% of the organism’s offspring and propagate through the population over successive generations. Because humans have fewer offspring and longer generation times compared to insects, it would take many generations and potentially hundreds of years for a gene drive introduced in a single human to spread widely through the population.

I apologies for my other reply - which was flagged - perhaps I was rude. You are wrong because there are ways to introduce a gene drive through pathogens - e.g. you introduce a self-generating CRISPR payload through a pathogen vector for which it is possible to completely saturate gen 0. Source: I worked in a leading biology lab, with biologists actually performing this research.

If you can get a pathogen vector to infect all of humanity you already have just about everything you need to cause massive damage; the gene drive doesn't make this situation appreciably worse.

(Speaking for myself, not SecureBio)

We are comparing guns and bullets. The fact that you can genetically engineer a pathogen vector to deliver a gene drive is not well known to the public.

We just recently had COVID which was likely bioengineered (as the lab leak is now "officially" considered a plausible explanation)

How could they make sure that the CRISPR payload survives replication?

Which replication? Of the virus or of gen 0?

But mosquitoes are super annoying, and the probably don't even know how to make nuclear bombs. I mean, lots of humans are annoying too, but not all of them. Every single mosquito is annoying, and they can't stop us, so, uhh.. let's do it.

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