To all the naysayers: Did you know that there were massive DDT campaigns to wipe out mosquitoes in Europe and the USA, which means you no longer suffer from malaria in Mississippi or Italy? Italy was only declared malaria-free in 1970.
The proposed measures have much lower environmental risks than the DDT ever did. Saying this shouldn't be used is effectively pulling up the ladder behind you. Go to Mozambique or DRC, get malaria, and then use the same health care the locals have access to. Hope to hell you don't have Cerebral Malaria (20% mortality rate with treatment). Then come back and complain about the environmental risks of wiping out 1 of over 15 mosquito species, which primarily feeds on humans anyways.
> a technology that no one could say is safe definitively
Problem with this type of technology is that there is no way to even test if it would be safe. You either have to just take the risk or not do it. And unfortunately someone else will likely take the risk even if we don't. So it makes more sense to me to try it and watch carefully.
BUT there is something that people aren't talking about much. This targeting isn't "kill all mosquitoes" it is "kill the mosquitoes that carry malaria" (Anopheles. Which are different from Aedes aegypti, which carry yellow fever, dengue fever, Zika fever and chikungunya). So doing this to Anopheles shouldn't affect the Aedes aegypti mosquito. So it is a tad safer than killing ALL the mosquitoes. But still potentially unsafe as other creatures may rely on them as a food source more than currently believed.
It also begs the question, can we try this out on a specific species that is far less widespread? Doesn't even have to be mosquitoes.
Disclaimer: Not a geneticist. If I stated something wrong please correct me! And please provide source material so I can read it. Thanks!
If they released this to eliminate Asian Tiger Mosquitoes from the USA it would be a perfect limited scope experiment. They have out competed other mosquitoes in my area and are invasive. They also spread disease and bite 24 hours a day making everyone's lives miserable outdoors. I wouldn't miss them at all. And there's not much life depending on eating Asian Tiger Mosquito larvae from trash with tiny pools of water. They don't make much of a meal for any animal or insect or we'd have far fewer.
It’s disturbing to realize that people here baying form this to be rolled out seemingly know very little about the topic. Mosquitoes aren’t just food for other insects, and bats, and birds, they’re also pollinators. In the context of how many insects and bees we’re killing by other means, it’s hard to predict how much of a critical role mosquitoes play in that regard. Insect numbers have been cratering lately, and kicking whole species off a cliff may not matter, or it may be a critical step. When considering these actions we have to remember just how much stress we are already putting on the food web, and how much more we’ll stress it in the future.
True, but in the context of a pilot program to target native species elsewhere. In short it wouldn’t meet that criteria, because the Asian Tiger mosquito is a recent invader. In the narrow case of targeting recent (decades rather than centuries, and then ATM qualifies as the former) invaders alone, I agree that few rational people would object.
Even if your premise is that we should prioritize human life above all else, there's still a very good reason to consider the effect of eliminating any species on the rest of the ecosystem before we just pull the trigger. It's really easy to imagine a scenario where eliminating this mosquito ends up being more harmful to human life than leaving it in place.
The effect has been considered, carefully, by a variety of researchers, and to date the majority of them have found no reason to believe there'd be more than the most negligible of effects on ecosystems. (When specifically eradicating the species that spread disease to humans.)
You can find some articles from researchers in the field that are concerned about removing them (https://phys.org/news/2017-07-mosquitoes.html), but those researchers don't seem to have done as much work in the role of individual mosquito species in their environments.
By April 1960, Chinese leaders changed their opinion due to the influence of ornithologist Tso-hsin Cheng[2] who pointed out that sparrows ate a large number of insects, as well as grains.[8][9] Rather than being increased, rice yields after the campaign were substantially decreased.[10][9] Mao ordered the end of the campaign against sparrows, replacing them with bed bugs, as the extermination of the former upset the ecological balance, and bugs destroyed crops as a result of the absence of natural predators. By this time, however, it was too late. With no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the country and compounding the ecological problems already caused by the Great Leap Forward, including widespread deforestation and misuse of poisons and pesticides.[10] Ecological imbalance is credited with exacerbating the Great Chinese Famine, in which 20–45 million people died of starvation.[11][12]
You say it's easy to imagine bad scenarios. Then state them, with sources.
I've read the exact opposite: That it's hard to find any _real_ risks for eliminating human-biting mosquitoes. I define real as killing near 3k children a day.
I agree that we should think about the ecosystem. But is that something we can reasonably model? From what I understand Anopheles isn't thought to be essential. Plus, this demonstration would show we could do similar things with other similarly dangerous and potentially non-essential animals.
Though a counterpoint, malaria was eradicated from Europe without eradicating Anopheles.
I'm not sure what that has to do with the topic at hand. Malaria was eradicated from Europe by a lot of stuff that happens when a country moves into a first world economy. Eg: Window screens (a mosquito net for your whole house!), less stagnant water spots (breeding zones), better health care, etc. Malaria was eradicated from Europe because the Plasmodium couldn't reproduce in large enough quantities.
Early vaccines got the dosage wrong and sometimes killed people... I think in this day and age if something similar happened, it'd be pulled off the shelves, and tens of thousands of lives would be lost due to it being unavailable.
Progress = risk. Yes, it should be measured and thoughtful, but overreaction seems rampant.
It's even worse than you're making out, actually. I'm all for eliminating malaria, or mosquitoes, or whatever. And I'm generally in favor of GMOs and related technologies. However, the described approach uses a gene drive, meaning genetic modifications are transmitted in the wild through the target species.
> So doing this to Anopheles shouldn't affect the Aedes aegypti mosquito.
If all goes according to plan, at least. But good luck containing things if they don't...
It really shouldn't require any help from Hollywood to see the potential failure cases that this sort of technology entails - incredibly thorough testing is merely the absolute minimum requirement.
> Consequently, individual cultivars themselves are not invasive, but the combination of cultivars within an area creates a situation in which invasive plants can be produced.
I fully agree that it is a horrendously difficult problem. But from cross breeding, most of the time the offspring is sterile. Like a mule or liger. But you're right, things often don't go according to plan.
But there is an overwhelming amount of scientists, who are smarter than me and actually study this, that believe it is worth the risk. I'm willing to put my trust into their judgement. Btw, there has been a LOT of testing. But what I mentioned in the OP was more about that at a certain point you have to take a leap of faith.
After having mosquitos invade my house this summer: please kill any mosquitos that bite people and carry disease. I don't care. We've unintentionally wiped out multitudes of interesting, beautiful species that did nothing to harm us, and it's revolting to observe that we're hemming and hawing about taking out the worst species in the history of the planet.
> "It could lead to other species coming in to fill a niche that are even more a problem," Steinbrecher says. "It's beyond our ability to predict what the consequences are, except that it could be really devastating."
Malaria has killed more people than all wars in human history combined. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, are going to die while we come up with reasons not to do anything about it.
A. gambiae in particular is so strongly anthropophilic that it would likely become endangered or extinct if cut off from all human hosts, so a widespread bed-netting program would have likely the same effect, just slower and with millions more cases of malaria in the meantime.
Any naysayers out there interested in volunteering for blood-feeding? Our current approach of "make the poor people do it" isn't exactly fair.
The application is fine, unfortunately the real danger is the technology itself. Nuclear power was dangerous, but at least it's somewhat tricky to generate refined uranium. CRISPR, unfortunately, is theoretically not that tricky.
This may lead to ecosystem crashes, but almost certainly not extinction. The gene drive, here, relies on two major features: high reproductive rate of mosquitoes, and the maintenance of the elements responsible for the drive.
First of all, geographically or reproductively isolated populations will not be affected and will repopulate.
Second, the components of the drive may recombine, creating offspring that will not be affected by the drive, and will out-compete the affected individuals within two generations.
Needless to say, the number of mosquitoes (of this species) will plummet. Perhaps, other insects, including mosquito species, will take advantage of their absence. But given their ubiquity and population sizes, some will survive. Maybe the genetic bottleneck that occurs will make them more susceptible to disease, but that's minor.
If we're going to be making species extinct anyway, I don't see any reason not to make wiping out the harmful ones a priority. Can we do Toxodendron next?
Well, it's worth asking. On the other hand, one rebuttal would go something like:
P1. We should calibrate our tolerance for risk against the level of harm we're addressing.
P2. Mosquitoes are at the high water mark for ongoing harm to humanity.
C. We should be more tolerant of risks here than against any or at least most other problems in the world.
Another rebuttal would be that a survey of leading biologists and entomologists leads to near unanimity that suddenly erasing mosquitoes from the planet wouldn't really have any downsides on the larger ecosystem:
If you want an updated review of biocontrol more generally, Outside/In has a great episode about it, with interviews with proponents and critics of biocontrol. One takeaway might be that there are a bunch of overlooked success stories, and the widely popularized failures provide a really distorted sample:
http://outsideinradio.org/shows/s02e01
On the other hand, it includes interviews with critics of biocontrol as well, so I feel like you could learn more details about both sides of the discussion.
Crashing the mosquito population greatly diminishes transmission of the disease.
Because malaria mostly infects humans, if you managed to create a malaria that conferred immunity, you'd have to infect lots and lots of people with it to spread it into the wild, and then it would only infect a subset of the people with the normal malaria strain.
This solution isn't about reduction, it is about eradication.
It is cost effective and also implies that you can do other things along the same lines. For example, you could do the same thing to Aedes aegypti (another mosquito species that carries thinks like Zika and Yellow Fever). You might be able to do it to bot flies. Lone Star Ticks. Or many others.
While I would love to see tick-borne disease wiped out, I just don't think that wiping out ticks is the right way. Instead, how about wiping out the parasites that are borne by these ticks?
It's a never ending cascade of special eradication. Today, ticks and mosquitoes carrying life threatening agents. Tomorrow, perhaps rats, cats, mice, sparrows, bed bugs, termites, and any other organism that we find inconvenient? How about certain kinds of humans, perhaps we can terminate people that are cognitively impaired? Wielding the rod of genocide seems like a poor choice.
Bhatt et al. (2015)4 studied the decline of cases of malaria in Africa between 2000 and 2015. They found that the single most important contributor to the decline were insecticide-treated bed nets. According to their findings bed nets were responsible for the aversion of 68% of the 663 million averted cases in Africa between 2000 and 2015. These are 451 million averted cases.
Furthermore only 30% of the population is sleeping under a bed net already in sub-Saharan Africa as mentioned bit further down in the same article. So there's still room for improvements.
I think a more interesting question than "should we do this or not" is "how would you build a tool that could model an entire ecosystem?". Does anyone reading this know what scientists use to do this currently?
Poor parts of Africa, Asia and Oceania are the ones who suffer and getting perpetually killed by this disease, not just malaria, even dengue, yellow fever, etc which have may have cause by mosquito. Why it keeps happening is that because they don't have really help from the Government about proper health care and education on how and what to do to avoid this. People, specially on poor status, mostly rely on their homemade or even herbal treatment that we knew will not help them at all. Malaria is a curable disease.
Just to play devils advocate.. what's the worst possible way this technology could be used? What if you give the mutation to people? Maybe people you don't like for some reason?
This will clearly have a negative, long-term effect on the environment by causing up to 400000 more human beings to reach sexual maturity in a part of the world where expanding human population is the major environmental threat. And, in the long run, a collapsing natural environment is also going to cause tremendous human suffering and death. But never mind it's just a drop in the ocean anyway, so go ahead.
Could they develop another version of the gene-drive modification that undoes the first effect? It seems like they should be able to do this and conduct an experiment in the laboratory that proves that there is at least theoretical ability to reverse the effect if it prove desirable to do so for some reason.
Seems like an achievable improvement on the safety model for this technique? Maybe a necessary step before deploying a tool like this for the first time?
This is theoretically possible. Researchers have also considered creating gene drives that automatically end after a certain number of generations.
It is a bit scary, but it is probably prudent to support such research, not only for interventions like this but as a possible countermeasure against biowarfare and bioterrorism using gene drives.
A notable difference is that Debug is using the sterile insect technique (SIT)[1], as opposed to gene drives, which are much harder to control once released. With SIT, 1) we have a lot more experience using it for decades, and 2) it's pretty easy to simply stop releasing sterile insects if unintended consequences were found.
I think this should be released without any form of government or popular consent (i.e. don't even ask them); JFDI. We do so many worse things on a regular basis with more concrete known negatives for far lower benefits.
Given the sheer complexity of the systems under consideration here (entire ecosystems, species population dynamics, the potential genome-wide interactions of even a single DNA mutation, etc) it seems wholly unreasonable to reduce this to the extent of "children dying == bad". To carry this absurd approach out to a simplified extreme, what if unintended consequences somehow resulted in twice as many children dying per day but we had failed to predict this due to not investigating things fully enough in advance?
Emotional appeal makes a very poor replacement for critical thinking.
>what if unintended consequences somehow resulted in twice as many children dying per day but we had failed to predict this due to not investigating things fully enough in advance?
And yet no plausible scenario is seriously identified to deliver such unintended consequences, so a net decrease of dead children is to be expected. That's past "good enough" in most people's book.
It helps that the effects would be indirect. Direct ones, like in the case of novel medicines, are scarier and harder to cope with. It's not easy to "try another body". But the indirect effect of, say, lower availability of certain food commodities due to bird and fish die-offs due to a dwindling mosquito population are as easy as "try other food sources".
I actually agree that this would presumably be a good thing to do. However, that's not because "children dying == bad" but rather precisely because a decent amount of research appears to have been directed at this idea already.
My intent was not to question the merits of the stated goal, but instead to highlight the importance of critical analysis instead of emotionally based lines of thought.
The idea is not to replace an emotional appeal with reason, but to wake people out of their complacency and have them face the reality of delay. Every day we wait we see another 3000 children die.
On the science side we already know the ecological consequences of removing these mosquitos - nothing. They play no important role in any ecosystem. More fundamentally ecosystems are not this sensitive to the removal of a single species, they are incredibly robust because unstable ecosystems don't survive. Species come and go, but ecosystems are near immovable.
The question comes down to a known massive bad outcome on one side (millions of kids dying) and a hypothetically and unmeasurably low risk on the other. What is the rational argument for delay?
That's a really bad attitude to take. It isn't that people don't care, it's that they worry about larger consequences. How about everyone who supports this write a letter to everyone on the earth explaining why they aren't worried about potential environmental collapse due to obliterating a key pollinator?
Note: I'm not sure what the actual risk is, I believe the general consensus is that non-malaria-carrying mosquito species will quickly fill in the ecological gap, but the point is that science and policy should look into the actual consequences, not make a knee-jerk reaction based on the more immediately noticeable appeal to emotion.
This is a logical trap. Mostly because people who worry about larger consequences can't satisfactorily describe how those can be evaluated. It's simply a lingering question that cannot be answered. If we treated every issue this way, nothing would ever happen, because larger consequences can never be perfectly foreseen.
Put another way, imagine you had a drug that cured the fatal illness of a family member. That drug was known to be safe for individuals to take. However, no one could receive the drug until a study was performed to understand how a decline in the mortality rate would affect the population. It's questionable whether your family member would survive until that study was performed. How would you feel?
That's a false equivalence. People have some knowledge of ecosystems, and they understand that removing a major component of an ecosystem might have catastrophic effects.
Making a small change to the survivability of humanity is not comparable, and certainly it is nonsense to suggest that this is equivalent to imposing the precautionary principle on every possible technological advance.
> and certainly it is nonsense to suggest that this is equivalent to imposing the precautionary principle on every possible technological advance
I agree, but would also like to point out that as technology in general becomes more "powerful" (for lack of a better term) ever increasing levels of precaution are inevitably going to be called for. The Wright brothers certainly didn't need to be regulated, but I'm glad SpaceX is...
I believe that the point being made by the person you're replying to isn't to avoid acting until future effects can be perfectly foreseen, as that milestone will generally never be reached. Rather, the future effects of an action should be evaluated to a level befitting the severity of the potential consequences.
Put another way, if something can be trivially reversed and can't reasonably be predicted to result in any severe negative effects, then not much analysis is called for. On the other hand, if something can be reasonably expected to have a lasting impact, particularly a negative one, careful analysis prior to action is much more important. In cases where it's difficult even to articulate the approximate range of possible effects, a thorough analysis becomes extremely important.
The species of mosquito that transmit malaria are not key pollinators in any ecosystem. We already know what happens in the places where rich people live when these species are killed - nothing other than people stop dying of malaria.
It is fine for us rich people to pontificate over ecosystems and possible unintended consequences, it is another for those poor people that have to watch their children dying in their arms.
Do you have any evidence that any reasonably foreseeable consequence is greater than 3000 children a day dying? If not, given that you know with a high degree of certainty that 3000 children are dying every die while there is a delay, it seems prudent to proceed as quickly as possible.
It's very naive/irresponsible to imply that anyone who would be concerned about massive ecosystem impacts doesn't care about malaria victims. Even the researchers are hesitant.
> The scientists acknowledge the technology raises serious concerns. So it will require broad political debate, rigorous regulation and the consent of people living in any areas where they might be released, they say.
> The point I was making is that these academic debates about ecosystems are at the expense of the lives of millions children.
The debate isn't so academic if it turns out the ecosystem impact of the thing you did to try to save millions of children ends up harming a different set of millions of children. To think we understand nature well enough to guarantee that won't happen is naive. There should absolutely be a high burden on those proposing this sort of thing, and suggesting so doesn't, in any way, imply a lack of sympathy for those who are currently suffering. But when you start talking about large-scale, population-level effect projects like this, you have to look at the greater good and not individual situations.
It is response like yours that make me so angry. Your argument applied to everything new - let's not do it because we don't understand all the potential consequences.
The irony is we know exactly what the consequences are in this case because we have already done the experiement of removing the malaria carrying mosquitos from various ecosystems and we discovered it has no effect other than people stopped dying of malaria.
Everyone opposed to getting rid of these Mosquitos has the blood of millions of children on their hands.
Actually they do if they cause the opposing side to justify the cost of not acting. Everything new has possible unintended consequences or side effects. Do you oppose everything new because of what might happen?
This is an emotional argument. I don't believe opposition is about morals, it's about concern over messing with the food chain. It would be incredibly naive to think we can mess with the food chain consequence free.
What if crashing the species results in millions of people dying? Will you write a letter to all those mothers?
I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but we need to know exactly what effects it will have first. And "grieving mothers" is not sufficient.
> What if crashing the species results in millions of people dying?
Do you know of any actual ecologist who thinks that those particular species are vital to the functioning of those ecosystems?
Here is one ecologist who thinks the removal of some mosquito species would be quite harmless:
"Yet in many cases, scientists acknowledge that the ecological scar left by a missing mosquito would heal quickly as the niche was filled by other organisms. Life would continue as before — or even better."
Malaria is the number one historical killer of humanity period. I believe that qualifies on practival grounds. Its death has been long overdue and I would say we have a moral imperative to eradicate the greatest threat to our species.
Historically, the species that threaten humans (or are tasty to humans), gets virtually wiped out. There's nothing new or scary about the proposition. Species aren't sacred, as every species dies out and has been replaced by others, countless times for all manner of reasons. Maybe it promotes something worse. There will always be other dangers to contend with.
Of course it is an emotional argument - it is meant to make concrete what is really happening right now as we dither.
The ecosystem will be fine without the mosquito species that transmit malaria and even if it wasn't it is a price worth paying. This whole argument is stupid anyway as we already know that killing off these mosquito species in the places where rich people live does not cause the ecosystem to crash.
The proposed measures have much lower environmental risks than the DDT ever did. Saying this shouldn't be used is effectively pulling up the ladder behind you. Go to Mozambique or DRC, get malaria, and then use the same health care the locals have access to. Hope to hell you don't have Cerebral Malaria (20% mortality rate with treatment). Then come back and complain about the environmental risks of wiping out 1 of over 15 mosquito species, which primarily feeds on humans anyways.