Should we reengineer the world's deadliest animal?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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The most ferocious predator for us humans is actually quite small. It's the mosquito. They are hungry for blood and spreading diseases all the time, including serious ones like malaria, yellow fever, and dengue. But what if we could wipe out the mosquito? We have the technology to do it. But should we? Here to discuss that is Ben Bradford, the host of a new podcast distributed by the NPR Network. It's called Are We Doomed?
It is. Hi, Emily.
So, Ben, your podcast Are We Doomed covers a lot from killer AI to nuclear weapons and, of course, the bloodthirsty micro predators I want to talk about today. How do you feel about mosquitoes, by the way?
I think they're gross and I think they're rude. And you mentioned, Emily, new gene editing techniques could allow us to eradicate our little insect nemesis, potentially saving millions of lives.
Yes, I learned that from you, from your show. The tech is here.
Yeah, thank you. And it would be amazing. But also in that technology is something inherently more dangerous. I talked to Kevin Esvelt, who is a biologist now at the MIT Media Lab.
If you can engineer a mosquito so it can't spread disease, you could engineer a mosquito so it always spreads disease.
Today on the show, the technology that allows us to kill the mosquito comes with all kinds of complications.
So what does it mean to try to change an entire species? Who gets to decide what might the ripple effects be?
What makes mosquitoes the deadliest animal for humans?
How do you test it? How do you protect it? Easy questions, you know.
You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Okay, Shore Rivers, I'm here with Ben Bradford, who's just done all this reporting on how to save millions of people from malaria by wiping out the mosquito. Ben, how does that even work?
Yeah. So let's go back to early last decade. Scientists developed a new form of gene editing, which you may know as CRISPR. It's this way of scalping out a tiny strand of DNA and you kind of like suture in a new trait. It doesn't quite look like that, but that's essentially what's happening. And so with CRISPR, you can cure a genetic disease or engineer a cow to grow without horns, both things that they have done in labs. But Kevin Esfeld, This biologist now at the MIT Media Lab had his own realization.
Turns out it doesn't just let you engineer organisms in the lab. It lets you let them go, and the engineered trait will spread to most of the ones in the wild. That's incredibly exciting.
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.
Because there are females to mate with. Yeah. Yeah.
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.
They are important to the environment. I didn't know that.
But they are. And it was disappointing. They're pollinators and birds and spiders. Yeah. All kinds of critters eat them.
Yeah. It would be reckless to wipe out mosquitoes entirely. But when it comes to Jerry, the mosquito from hell, he's just meant to wipe out the mosquitoes that carry malaria in a certain region. But- Then the question becomes, how do you do that without affecting birds and spiders?
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.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:53
2
What makes mosquitoes the deadliest animal for humans?
1:53–4:43
3
What gene-editing technology could potentially eradicate mosquitoes?
4:43–6:53
4
What are the potential risks of wiping out mosquitoes?
6:53–10:09
5
How does CRISPR technology work in relation to mosquitoes?
10:09–12:14
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from Short Wave
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