Ben Bradford

This biologist now at the MIT Media Lab had his own realization.

Kevin is the person who figured out you could CRISPR a creature, do his little DNA surgery, so it always passes along the gene that you put into it.

And so with CRISPR, the idea is you can create a mosquito that, for instance, always has males and then its offspring will always have males.

And so you put it into an area and it extinguishes all these species carrying malaria in that area.

And so to do this, you, of course, have to engineer a mosquito from hell.

In the show, we called him Jerry.

To clarify, Jerry's mission is actually not to murder all mosquitoes because they're just trying to target in an area with malaria.

And that's because mosquitoes are ecologically important.

But they are.

And it was disappointing.

They're pollinators and birds and spiders.

Yeah.

All kinds of critters eat them.

So the idea is to offer birds and spiders a different kind of mosquito to snack on, one that doesn't transmit malaria because there's a whole bunch of different types of mosquito species.

And even better or worse, Kevin says, we don't need to take out the malaria-carrying mosquitoes forever even.

Yeah, that's right.

We just need them to disappear for a little while.

So if the mosquitoes go on sabbatical for long enough...

for the malaria to die out in the humans that the mosquitoes pick up the malaria from and transmit it between.

Then when the mosquitoes come back, the malaria is gone and there's just nothing for them to transmit.