Ben Bradford

speaker

229 appearances 14 recordings 3 series first heard May 2026 last heard 13 Aug

Ben Bradford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 14 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 11.

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Short Wave · Should we reengineer the world's deadliest animal? · 27 May 2026 podcast

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.

Just enough.

Yeah.

And so it turns out that there's a whole bunch of steps that you kind of have to follow if you're going to do this in a way where you, one, test that the thing actually is going to work.

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