We finally may be able to rid the world of mosquitoes. But should we?
Women and children wait in line for malaria medication at a health center in Nametil, Mozambique, in 2023.
Image: Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post
Dino Grandoni
They buzz, they bite, and they cause some of the deadliest diseases known to humanity. Mosquitoes are perhaps the planet's most universally reviled animals.
If we could zap them off the face of the Earth, should we?
The question is no longer hypothetical. In recent years, scientists have devised powerful genetic tools that may be able to eradicate mosquitoes and other pests once and for all.
Now, some doctors and scientists say it is time to take the extraordinary step of unleashing gene editing to suppress mosquitoes and avoid human suffering from malaria, dengue, West Nile virus and other serious diseases.
'There are so many lives at stake with malaria that we want to make sure that this technology could be used in the near future,' said Alekos Simoni, a molecular biologist with Target Malaria, a project aiming to target vector mosquitoes in sub-Saharan Africa.
Yet the development of this technology also raises a profound ethical question: When, if ever, is it okay to intentionally drive a species out of existence?
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Even the famed naturalist EO Wilson once said: 'I would gladly throw the switch and be the executioner myself' for malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
But some researchers and ethicists warn it may be too dangerous to tinker with the underpinnings of life itself. Even irritating, itty-bitty mosquitoes, they say, may have enough inherent value to keep around.
Simoni and his colleagues are seeking to diminish populations of mosquitoes in the Anopheles gambiae complex that are responsible for spreading malaria.
Image: Supplied
How to exterminate mosquitoes
Target Malaria is one of the most ambitious mosquito suppression efforts in the works. Simoni and his colleagues are seeking to diminish populations of mosquitoes in the Anopheles gambiae complex that are responsible for spreading the deadly disease.
In their labs, the scientists have introduced a gene mutation that causes female mosquito offspring to hatch without functional ovaries, rendering them infertile. Male mosquito offspring can carry the gene but remain physically unaffected.
The concept is that when female mosquitoes inherit the gene from both their mother and father, they will go on to die without producing offspring. Meanwhile, when males and females carrying just one copy of the gene mate with wild mosquitoes, they will spread the gene further until no fertile females are left - and the population crashes.
Simoni said he hopes Target Malaria can move beyond the lab and deploy some of the genetically modified mosquitoes in their natural habitats within the next five years. The nonprofit research consortium gets its core funding from the Gates Foundation, backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and Open Philanthropy, backed by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna.
'We believe that this technology can really be transformative,' Simoni said.
At the heart of Target Malaria's work is a powerful genetic tool called a gene drive.
Under the normal rules of inheritance, a parent has a 50-50 chance of passing a particular gene on to an offspring. But by adding special genetic machinery - dubbed a gene drive - to segments of DNA, scientists can rig the coin flip and ensure a gene is included in an animal's eggs and sperm, nearly guaranteeing it will be passed along.
Over successive generations, gene drives can cause a trait to spread across an entire species's population, even if that gene doesn't benefit the organism.
In that way, gene drives do something remarkable: They allow humans to override Charles Darwin's rules for natural selection, which normally prods populations of plants and animals to adapt to their environment over time.
'Technology is presenting new options to us,' said Christopher Preston, a University of Montana environmental philosopher. 'We might've been able to make a species go extinct 150 years ago by harpooning it too much or shooting it out of the sky. But today, we have different options, and extinction could be completed or could be started in a lab.'
Even naturalist EO Wilson once said: 'I would gladly throw the switch and be the executioner myself', referring to malaria carrying mosquitoes.
Image: File
How far should we go in eradicating mosquitoes?
When so many wildlife conservationists are trying to save plants and animals from disappearing, the mosquito is one of the few creatures that people argue is actually worthy of extinction. Forget about tigers or bears; it's the tiny mosquito that is the deadliest animal on Earth.
The human misery caused by malaria is undeniable. Nearly 600,000 people died of the disease in 2023, according to the World Health Organization, with the majority of cases in Africa.
On the continent, the death toll is akin to 'crashing two Boeing 747s into Kilimanjaro' every day, said Paul Ndebele, a bioethicist at George Washington University.
For gene-drive advocates, making the case for releasing genetically modified mosquitoes in nations such as Burkina Faso or Uganda is straightforward.
On the continent, the death toll is akin to 'crashing two Boeing 747s into Kilimanjaro' every day, said Paul Ndebele, a bioethicist at George Washington University and UKZN graduate.
Image: File
'This is not a difficult audience, because these are people that are living in an area where children are dying,' said Krystal Birungi, an entomologist for Target Malaria in Uganda, though she added that she sometimes has to fight misinformation, such as the false idea that bites from genetically modified mosquitoes can make people sterile.
But recently, the Hastings Center for Bioethics, a research institute in New York, and Arizona State University brought together a group of bioethicists to discuss the potential pitfalls of intentionally trying to drive a species to extinction. In a policy paper published in the journal Science last month, the group concluded that 'deliberate full extinction might occasionally be acceptable, but only extremely rarely.'
A compelling candidate for total eradication, according to the bioethicists, is the New World screwworm. This parasitic fly, which lays eggs in wounds and eats the flesh of both humans and livestock, appears to play little role in ecosystems. Infections are difficult to treat and can lead to slow and painful deaths.
Yet it may be too risky, they say, to use gene drives on invasive rodents on remote Pacific islands where they decimate native birds, given the nonzero chance of a gene-edited rat or mouse jumping ship to the mainland and spreading across a continent.
'Even at a microbial level, it became plain in our conversations, we are not in favor of remaking the world to suit human desires,' said Gregory Kaebnick, a senior research scholar at the institute.
It's unclear how important malaria-carrying mosquitoes are to broader ecosystems. Little research has been done to figure out whether frogs or other animals that eat the insects would be able to find their meals elsewhere. Scientists are hotly debating whether a broader 'insect apocalypse' is underway in many parts of the world, which may imperil other creatures that depend on them for food and pollination.
'The eradication of the mosquito through a genetic technology would have the potential to create global eradication in a way that just felt a little risky,' said Preston, who contributed with Ndebele to the discussion published in Science.
Researchers said, geneticists should be able to use gene editing, vaccines and other tools to target not the mosquito itself, but the single-celled Plasmodium parasite that is responsible for malaria.
Image: File
Instead, the authors said, geneticists should be able to use gene editing, vaccines and other tools to target not the mosquito itself, but the single-celled Plasmodium parasite that is responsible for malaria. That invisible microorganism - which a mosquito transfers from its saliva to a person's blood when it bites - is the real culprit.
'You can get rid of malaria without actually getting rid of the mosquito,' Kaebnick said. He added that, at a time when the Trump administration talks cavalierly about animals going extinct, intentional extinction should be an option for only 'particularly horrific species.'
But Ndebele, who is from Zimbabwe, noted that most of the people opposed to the elimination of the mosquitoes 'are not based in Africa.'
Ndebele has intimate experience with malaria; he once had to rush his sick son to a hospital after the disease manifested as a hallucinatory episode.
'We're just in panic mode,' he recalled. 'You can just imagine - we're not sure what's happening with this young guy.'
Still, Ndebele and his colleagues expressed caution about using gene-drive technology.
Even if people were to agree to rid the globe of every mosquito - not just Anopheles gambiae but also ones that transmit other diseases or merely bite and irritate - it would be a 'herculean undertaking,' according to Kaebnick.
There are more than 3,500 known species, each potentially requiring its own specially designed gene drive. And there is no guarantee a gene drive would wipe out a population as intended.
Simoni, the gene-drive researcher, agreed that there are limits to what the technology can do. His team's modeling suggests it would suppress malaria-carrying mosquitoes only locally without outright eliminating them.
Mosquitoes have been 'around for hundreds of millions of years,' he said. 'It's a very difficult species to eliminate.'
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