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Malaria: GM mosquitoes offer new hope for millions
Controversial strategy would mean releasing laboratory-created insects into wild
Ian Sample, science correspondent
Tuesday March 20, 2007
The Guardian

The multimillion-dollar effort to eradicate one of the world's deadliest diseases received a significant but controversial boost yesterday when scientists announced the creation of genetically modified mosquitoes that cannot pass on malaria.

Trials revealed that the GM mosquitoes could quickly establish themselves in the wild and drive out natural malaria-carrying insects, thereby breaking the route through which humans are infected.

The strategy is likely to prove contentious as it would require the unprecedented release of tens of thousands of GM organisms into the wild. But it has raised hopes among scientists, some of whom believe it may be powerful enough to finally bring under control a disease which strikes 300 million people a year and causes more than 1 million deaths, mostly of children in sub-Saharan Africa.

Plans to combat malaria with disease-resistant mosquitoes have been hampered in the past by fears that adding crucial resistance genes weakens the insects, making them too feeble to survive in the wild. For the idea to work, the malaria-resistant insects must breed and become dominant, so that the parasite is not picked up from infected animals and passed on to humans through insect bites.

Researchers led by Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena at the Malaria Research Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland created genetically modified mosquitoes by giving them a gene that made it impossible for them to pass on the plasmodium parasite that causes malaria. Around 1,200 GM mosquitoes were then released into a cage holding malaria-infected mice and the same number of wild mosquitoes.

Over time, the researchers found that the GM mosquitoes slowly became the majority, reaching 70% in nine generations. The scientists believe that even though malaria-resistance weakened the mosquitoes by making them immune to the parasite, they fared better in the long term than insects infected with it because they lived longer and laid more eggs.

"This fitness advantage has important implications for devising malaria control strategies," the team write in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Why is my spider-sense all a-tingly and my mind conjuring up Doomsday scenarios? I'm not expert enough to think about whether this is a bad idea or not, but it's the decades of Frankenstein-complex conditioning from science fiction that are giving me the heebie-jeebies...