Brazilians welcome genetically-modified mosquito to help fight dengue fever

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 engineered mosquitoes affect the environmenr in other unknown and not measurable ways.

It's worth looking at any biological alternative to the widespread use of insecticides.

[0] http://www.eliminatedengue.com/our-research/wolbachia

Sometimes I think no one even bothered paying attention to Jurassic Park.

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

> That's how Nature works.

More accurately, "That's how Nature works, sometimes."

The statement "...some mutant gene will eventually emerge ... that will inhibit [another gene]" describes one subset of the set of all possible causes of future genetic expression branching from this point. There is no law (that we are yet aware of) that allows us to say conclusively that a certain genetic trait will be selected for or against with any meaningful certainty. Furthermore, we have no scientific footing on which to say 'we are sure that a specific mutation will arise that will inhibit this other mutation' as decreed by Nature. In order for the claim to always be true in all arbitrary subsets of Nature, we would need to at least know: whether or not the gene will be selected against, specifically how the gene will be selected against, and nearly all nth order organism-local and population-global effects of a specific mutation or selection event. (We can play Nature in the lab and make approximations of the claim, though! Sort of.)

We can make statements like "If the oxygen content of that atmosphere or environment increases, it is possible that many anaerobic organisms will be selected against." Or, "If low hemoglobin production becomes advantageous, at some point after that, conditions x, y, and ... will likely exhibit reciprocal selective pressures."

Of course, we can also say things like, "All species are statistically likely to go extinct." (That's not very interesting.)

Essentially, we can make broad guesses about future states of genetic expression (and implied warranties and effects) under certain specific contexts. But we cannot say that a specific genetic cause and effect will occur as derived from an inherent property of Nature and a specific sub-state of the universe. As far as we know, genetics, mutation, evolution, and selection are just functions in a mostly random, iterated chaotic system that we are just beginning to comprehend.

We cannot say that 'a particular gene will be selected against, because it is inevitable that specific genes are invariably inhibited or selected against by subsequent shifts in population genetics.' In a sense, that's partially accurate. All species, and by extension, each gene and all genomes, are likely to be selected against. But not always via mutation. It's about the same as saying that species go extinct because of x; it's not certain to be true and may not yield any new information.

There is no law (that we know of) that allows us to make deterministic statements like 'X% of the genome will be inhibited because of the emergence of another mutation'.

For all we know, a rogue asteroid might hit Earth on Tuesday during rush hour in Hong Kong. Or, that particular gene may end up surviving until the closest possible moment before the heat death of the universe. On a more fundamental level, we'd need laws that allow us to predict specific future events (with interesting and meaningful degrees of certainty). We would need to be able to identify and map the exquisitely threaded chaos woven throughout Nature before we can be reasonably certain that 'a mutation will eventually arise to inhibit this other mutation.'

Jury's out on whether this change could happen before the mosquito population falls below sustainable levels, though. Mosquitos breed rapidly, but they don't hold a candle to bacteria breeding rates and it takes a lot of generations for those to evolve resistance to each generation of antibacterials.

Oh wait...

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.

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengue_fever It is not entirely clear why secondary infection with a different strain of dengue virus places people at risk of dengue hemorrhagic fever and dengue shock syndrome. The most widely accepted hypothesis is that of antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). The exact mechanism behind ADE is unclear.

"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.'"

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.

There are about 3000 species of mosquitoes in the world, of which three bear deadly disease:

1. Anopheles (malaria, elephantiasis, and encephalitis)

2. Culex (encephalitis, elephantiasis, and West Nile virus)

3. Aedes (yellow fever, dengue, and encephalitis)

Asian Tiger mosquitoes are a subspecies of Aedes.

If we were to wipe out these three voracious breeds, the world would go on: flowers would continue to be pollinated, frogs and birds would continue to feed.

The risk of this type of eradication effort is not that we "upset the balance" but that we somehow create a resistant strain or mutation that is an even bigger problem, such as the Africanized honey bee fiasco. But that risk is relatively minor, since they're releasing sterile mosquitoes to end reproduction, not fertile ones designed to continue breeding.

There are a couple of hundred species that feed on blood; the rest don't. If we rid the world of all the blood sucking mosquito species, likely it would make little difference ecologically, and millions of lives would be saved and the quality of life for humans would increase. It's highly unlikely that we can do it, but we should at least try.

The naysayers have a rather weak case. I say, go for it. Nature is always in balance. Life is dynamic, not static; species come and go all the time, and always have done so.

http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2010/07/scientists-go-ahead-kil...

Nothing in the world relies on mosquitoes as a food source. Some insectivores will happily eat mosquitoes if they can get them, but mainly feed on other species.

Mosquitoes also play a role in pollination in some areas, but, again, all mosquito-pollinated plants are more reliably pollinated by other local insects.