To those who are worried about this test or concerned about ecological impacts - please let my share my context which I hope will make your position more flexible.
My personal context is that my grandfather was president of the Florida mosquito control board, who sprays enormous quantities of pesticides into nature in order to protect human health, and my mother, who works for the CDC on infectious diseases in sub-saharan Africa and South America.
The subset of disease carrying mosquitos are the most deadly disease vector to humans worldwide, and have no consequential energy contribution back to the bottom of the food chain. If you are worried about the food security of an animal or insect who only eats these disease carrying mosquitos, consider the magnitude greater number of insect species pushed near extinction or vastly reduced by our use of pesticides for mosquito control.
With this work, we move one step closer to being able to eliminate disease carrying mosquitos, leave the rest of the mosquito species alone, and finally stop spraying so much pesticide (that causes untold ecological damage) into nature and near human habitation.
While contrarianism is a valuable american (and human) trait, in this situation it is misplaced, mis-informed, and dangerous. An educated man's anti-vaxx, if you will.
Imagine the equatorial portions of the world without malaria, west-nile, yellow-fever, and dengue. Eliminating the largest amount of untold human and animal misery since the invention of anti-biotics, while stopping the indiscriminate use of devastating quantities of pesticides that destroy and distort ecosystems.
These diseases do not only kill, but physically main and mentally injure their hosts for the rest of their lives. In the developed world we are lucky not to have these issues due to pesticides, medicine, and a generally cold climate.
The equatorial countries are often impoverished, and the people who live there suffer from these diseases much more than we do. The contribution of persistent mosquito borne diseases to poverty is enormous and difficult to quantify.
I believe it is only from the most sheltered contexts and outlooks that one can oppose this measure of progress. If you oppose this test think twice - please reconsider. If your opposition is effective, people will die and suffer needlessly.
"Oxitec’s mosquitoes, for instance, are genetically altered to pass what the company calls “self-limiting” genes to their offspring; when released GM males breed with wild female mosquitoes, the resulting generation does not survive into adulthood, reducing the overall population."
This is incorrect and reflects the general illiteracy of the population towards this technology. They are producing "gene drive" mosquitos, which contain a genetic element that restricts the sex their offspring, and the offspring of all their descendants, to be male. Gene drive mosquitos cannot breed with each other, because they are male, reducing the total number of mosquito offspring in the next generation, but they compete with unmodified males for mates, spreading the gene drive and exponentially growing their population and repressing the total population more.
People, even on hacker news, seem to think we live in a Spider Man comic book. From this thread:
"How long before we have lockdowns due to mutant strains of man eating mosquitos."
It is simply untrue that there are no other options. There are many options. GMO mosquitos are another unwanted product from Intrexon which specializes in GMO foods that failed in the market (GMO apples and salmon).
I lived in the Keys during the first attempt at this trial and there is so much wrong with it, we put together a whole website at the time. This page talks about Wolbachia, a safer and already approved alternative: https://neveragainkw.wordpress.com/2016/10/16/wolbachia-read...
Any mention of mosquitos in the Florida Keys should come with the disclosure that the FKMCD (Mosquito Control District) is the single best funded entity in the entire state of Florida. There is serious money to made here and Intrexon/Oxitec only has to sell to one customer at a time -- the District -- not the people who live there.
From your link: "Oxitec’s GMO mosquitoes do not have any built-in disease suppression and they aren’t truly sterile, meaning Oxitec GMO mosquitoes can also bite human beings and transmit disease"
But isn't Oxitec only releasing males? Male mosquitos don't bite.
That may be the goal, but it’s not the reality. At best Oxitec can sort out about 99.98% of the females. That sounds terrific until you realize that even the Key Haven test requires releasing over 14 million mosquitoes. The company expects to be able to come 3x a week for 22 months to tend to the breeding containers.
Even the suggestion that the GMO mosquitoes are “bred to mate females” is misleading. In actuality, the GMO mosquito, crippled as it is by artificial DNA, does a poor job of mating. Unsurprisingly, wild type female mosquitoes don’t particularly prefer it. So Oxitec has to overwhelm the natural system with 5-25 times as many artificial mosquitoes as natural ones. The company’s tests in the Cayman Islands showed an effect on population only after massive, repeated GMO mosquito releases. The Oxitec GMO mosquito is its own Neverending Story.
Even with 25 times as many „artificial“ mosquitoes, the 0.02% females remaining are probably still a tiny amount compared to the naturally occurring ones.
It's of note that the project is so unpopular in the Keys that they have had to move from a Keys-wide trial covering thousands of homes to an opt-in only test with 130 houses. In other words, the people who live there don't want to be part of the experiment.
> No one can know the effects of Oxitec’s artificial DNA entering the human bloodstream through mosquito bites
I'm still not sure I understand the problem. This entire experiment feels like a much safer version of the time the USA released a massive amount of DDT to end polio transmission [0]. DDT is obviously horrible for humans, but now we also live in a country without polio. There are costs to everything. Nothing is perfect.
Please provide better evidence than "having non-natural DNA in your blood is bad".
Except that the DDT probably had little to no effect on the transmission of Polio, and the real reason we live in a country without polio is that we've got a vaccine against it.
Right, I didn't add any context in my first comment, but the point is that DDT and mosquito control were an important component of disease control in the United States, regardless of whether polio is relevant to the discussion or not.
I wrote a whole website about this, so I'm not really down to debate it with you. There's a lot to read about this, including source documents from Oxitec and the FDA. You can draw your own conclusions from the evidence that's there.
Not everyone has the time to read "a whole website," nor is everyone inclined to if you are unwilling to clear up a seemingly unscientific concept (DNA from GMO entities ending up in our genome).
Hello from Miami. Sorry but your assessment is just a luddite fallacy. You point out potential harm without acknowledging any potential benefits. It's clear to me that the potential benefits massively outweigh the potential harms.
The potential harms you point out are tiny compared to the millions of lives ruined and hundreds of thousands of deaths caused each year by malaria.
Yes, because of Zika and dengue as other commenters have mentioned.
But that shouldn't really matter. We should fight for a system where obviously-good work can be done even if NIMBYs don't directly benefit from the work. If we're forced into we're forced into talking about how to placate/bribe Florida residents, then we've already lost.
I'm all for reducing the EEE in the Greater Boston Area, too.
There are only four species of mosquito that bite humans. They are a tiny part of the food chain, and would be completely replaced by other food sources.
It's also not the first time humans have successfully made this kind of intervention.
(I believe it was posted to HN a while back, but the article stuck with me as we don't dare enjoy the outdoors here for fear of our child getting Eastern Equine Encephalitis: https://www.cdc.gov/easternequineencephalitis/index.html )
AquaBounty's GMO salmon hasn't "failed in the market"... it literally hasn't hit the market yet, but is still being actively developed, despite unending environmentalist lawsuits.
I don't get the GMO-bad crowd. Before GMO crops, you would take seeds and irradiate them. Then plant them and see what interesting mutations happen. And somehow GMO is worse than that? SMH
It seems there is a lot in common with GMO FUD and anti-vaccine FUD. Both have a huge distrust of technology that has been shown by scientific study after study to be safe. Both talk about potential risk in general, especially theoretical worst case scenarios, and demand an impossible level of confidence, while ignoring the concrete trade offs and baseline risks.
About time Humans eradicated mosquitoes - they are by far the number 1 animal, that kills humans and are responsible for untold misery and suffering to humans, livestock and wildlife. Of course their predators may decline somewhat but that’s a price worth paying. Humans have decimated so many ecosystems - eg in Great Britain were no large beneficial predators remain - that this change pails in comparison.
Most mosquitoes are harmless, so getting rid of all of them would be incredibly stupid. Getting rid of only species which carry malaria is another matter entirely.
Also, the fact humans have destroyed a lot of biodiversity already is no excuse to do so in the future.
This story is about Aedes aegypti - it certainly does spread dengue fever, chikungunya, Zika fever, Mayaro and yellow fever.
I’m not super comfortable with the unknown risks related to GM insects but having seen the impact of dengue first hand I hope this proves successful at limiting the insect population in urban areas.
Wars are not biological, unless you subscribe to some very meta-thought on population control.
Pandemics could be argued to be a biological control on population, but I think mosquitos would be of more naturally-recurring consequence that make it a "normal" form of population control.
Nope. I am not saying "because it is natural it is good". I am saying that mosquitos, and their negative side effects, play some role in the ecosystem and eradicating them entirely sounds suspiciously like fucking with the firmware too much.
>I am saying that mosquitos, and their negative side effects, play some role in the ecosystem and eradicating them entirely sounds suspiciously like fucking with the firmware too much.
Would you say the same about diseases and pandemics?
There are plenty of things humans do that sound suspiciously like "fucking with the firmware too much", but I don't think many would argue that eradicating polio or fighting cancer or HIV are bad things. And even the "side effects" excuse would apply here too, because letting those people pass on their genes to their offspring potentially interrupts the "natural ecosystem" and introduces weak links into the gene pool.
But there are plenty of good reasons for why this line of thought would not gather much sympathy or consideration these days.
> Would you say the same about diseases and pandemics?
For sure. Anything that we chip away in population control will end up having effects elsewhere in the ecosystem. I don't understand how that's a controversial statement. That doesn't mean we shouldn't but it also doesn't mean eradicating things like mosquitos is a good idea either. The same arguments have been given time and again when talking about genetically modified species of insects and animals; the variables of change are too high to predict how it will affect the world around us.
Imagine if all animals and all humans only died of old age from the dawn of time until now. Would Earth be able to sustain itself? I think not. Maybe biology has changed since I've taken it, but these things are considered pieces that are a larger part of homeostasis for ecosystems.
The last part of your statement is just generally confusing.
With all due respect but the role of the "number 1 animal, that [...] is responsible for untold misery and suffering to humans, livestock and wildlife" clearly falls to humans.
Mosquito-borne diseases have killed far more humans than all wars in history. I don't have an estimate for how many other creatures they have killed, nor how much suffering they have caused, but on the whole I suspect mosquitoes are still the winner by a wide margin.
My understanding is that it is quite difficult for a disease to be spread by mosquitoes. There's an aspect of co-evolution that limits significant spread to particular species. Of thousands of species of mosquito, there are just a handful that cause the vast majority of suffering.
Believe it or not, the balance of nature depends on them. What would dragon flies eat? What would endangered birds that eat dragonflies eat?
Some animal populations are _only_ constrained by their food supply and disease vectors in the environment. For instance, local deer populations, where human's have eradicated their predators, quickly spiral out of control unless hunting permits can be issued in number to keep the populations in check.
Eradication isn't a good goal, but perhaps rebalancing is and removing those that spread deadly cross-species diseases.
I believe this argument has been mostly refuted in the scientific community. Here's an excerpt from a Forbes article on the topic:
What are the risks of eradicating mosquitoes?
As you noticed, there are no keystone species in mosquitoes. No ecosystem depends on any mosquito to the point that it would collapse if they were to disappear. An exception may be the Arctic, but the species there are non-vectors and thus can be left alone.
Didn't know that, but there's far more out there on the topic if you go looking for the info. Bill Gates had some commentary on the topic regarding the ecological impacts not being what people believe them to be (under the umbrella of public health in Africa).
I agree with your statement's intent, but it not quite right to compare the eradication of higher level creatures in the food chain to ones that are quite lower. The eradication of insects and bugs can potentially be more disruptive than removing an apex predator species.
As others have stated however, mosquitoes have been studied to not have a significant impact if they were to go extinct.
There are 3000 species of mosquito. Only a few dozen transmit diseases to humans, and of those just 3 are the primary spreaders. No predator feeds exclusively on the disease spreading species.
Last I checked the animal most deadly to humans was the white tailed deer which have an unfortunate habit of leaping in front of speeding vehicles and then freezing there until struck.
I was talking about yearly numbers in North America. Sorry I made you angry, but honestly I think I was contributing positively to the conversation such that the downvote--yes, I am commenting about the downvote--was unwarranted.
Right. Aedes aegypti is native to Africa (as one might guess from the name), and is essentially an invasive species elsewhere in the world.
If anything, wiping them out should push the local ecosystem back toward its normal state, as the native species of mosquito (of which there are many) would face less competition from the invasive Aedes aegypti.
There are thousands of mosquito species and only a few dozen spread diseases to humans, of which only 3 make up the vast majority. Eradicating the disease carriers would have minimal effects on the ecosystems.
> Eradicating the disease carriers would have minimal effects on the ecosystems.
I'm not going to ask you to prove a negative, but it sure sounds like it's going against all the advice I've heard about ecology.
Namely that ecosystems are far more complex than we understand and that even small changes can compound into larger changes. Basically: don't play God.
If this is safe and it does work, then it might be helpful to have some new messaging about when and where we can start actively designing ecosystems.
"Don't mess with mother nature" is easy to understand. So, how would you create a new maxim that preserve that general rules but also accommodates eliminating undesirable subspecies?
(Un)fortunately, we already are God. We already mess with Mother Nature. Our continued existence has impacts so complex that those impacts cannot be modulated solely in degree, because changing degree causes a cascade of effects that makes it a change in type.
It is unpredictable, not because it is natural, not because it is sacred or some other special case, but because of the number of parts. And in spite of that lack of clarity, we are inescapably responsible for making choices that will steer the ecosystem. As Sartre wrote,
> In one sense choice is possible, but what is not possible is not to choose. I can always choose, but I must know that if I do not choose, that is still a choice.
There is no surety that non-intervention will lead to outcomes that are better by any measure, whether that measure is long-term stability, convenience for humans, or nearly any other you might choose. Left alone, nature can only select the traits that made the last generation breed the most. None of that is proof against the future. For every species alive today, many others are dead, exactly because nature was not messed with. Nature does not share humanity's moral attachment to conservationism.
"Don't mess with markets" is easy to understand. That said people are perfectly willing to mess with them in ways both large and small. Sometimes they have a guiding maxim and sometimes they just say it's a self-evident action that will outweigh any downside.
I suspect the truth is that in both cases it comes down to who is going to benefit - with it more likely to happen if the "who" is either a large number or a small number with a lot of influence and the "benefit" is something that's immediately apparent to the winners and not immediately apparent to the people who lose in the intervention.
We introduced invasive species like tumbleweeds (unknowlingly) that have messed with mother nature.
We have also introduced some species that haven't really created problems.
We have also created new habitats (cities) where some species are quite problematic. If we could get rid of cockroaches and bed-bugs, life would certainly become better.
It's not like we're snapping our fingers and making an irreversible change to the whole planet. We can and have been testing this process in isolated cases and if anything unexpected happens we can stop the process and reintroduce the species, but we actually do have a pretty good understanding of ecosystems.
Mother nature does not have your best interests at heart, and decisions that affect the lives of millions should not be made based off short maxims.
> We can and have been testing this process in isolated cases
Anytime you jump from the lab to the real world it's going to be different. And each ecosystem in the country and state will be slightly different.
> if anything unexpected happens we can stop the process and reintroduce the species
Has this been done before with insects though? This sounds a lot harder than reintroducing wolves at Yellowstone that are small enough in number that they can be monitored.
Even the "Mosquito Fish" doesn't exclusively eat mosquito larvae and tends to prefer other food sources. I don't know of any species that exclusively prey on Mosquitoes.
For those who don’t know, it’s a story worth telling: Rabbits on my grandma’s fields (France) have red eyes. All because of Australia ;)
Rabbits were introduced to Australia to get rid of other pests.
Then myxomatosis was engineered circa 1950 to get rid of rabbits. It killed 95% of them in 5 years. The 5% reproduced and now all rabbits in Australia have myxomatosis.
The researcher wanted to get rid of rabbits in his garden in UK. He brought myxomatosis back and 95% UK rabbits were killed in 2 years. The 5% regrew and all UK rabbits are myxo-resistant.
It spread to France. But I guess, by now, you know the story ;) Hence the story of the red-eyed rabbits.
This technology will surely benefit Florida. GMO Mosquitoes will be able to balance the ecosystem while decreasing human cases.
Even though scientists state that this will be safe for our health and environment, they should still consider the community's voice because many people are doubtful about GMOs ' impact on our settings.
If you know more than others do, that's great! Please share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn. If you don't want to do that, that's fine, but in that case please don't post. Dismissive putdowns just make things worse, especially when upvoted to the top of a thread.
This is not a widespread campaign, this is a test. This is, in fact, the second test.
Even if the ecosystem is too complex for us to understand now, that's not to say it's to complex to ever understand, and if we're ever to understand it, how should we go about that? Tests.
The human body was once considered too complex to understand. We may not know everything about the body, but we do know quite a bit, to the benefit of everyone alive today.
Caution is beneficial. Immediately discarding avenues of research and testing benefits because of incautious approaches of the past is not. This is not a case of people ignoring history repeating it, this is a case of people trying to learn from history and do it better next time, which is really the story of the human race.
Might this end badly? It's possible. None can say it isn't. Even if it does, I'm not sure that means this approach should be abandoned. The eventual benefit of what they are attempting, even if limiting it purely to what we might get from controlling some breeds of disease spreading mosquitos, is massive.
If it possibly might end badly, it must never happen out of lab. One can't even predict how it could end up. Low gains, gigantic risks for everyone and everything living nearby.
This is an act of eco-terrorism done by corporations. It shouldn't be treated better than oil spilling.
> If it possibly might end badly, it must never happen out of lab.
This is an absurd line of thinking. You can always make up some infinitesimally unlikely outcome for any action. The fact is mosquito-transmitted diseases are a real problem, the risks you are talking about are not.
> If it possibly might end badly, it must never happen out of lab.
There are many different ways and degrees of "badly". What you you thinking of when "ending badly" is mentioned? How accurate and likely is that an outcome? Is it based on knowledge of possible outcomes based on the science, and extrapolations, or on popular science and/or cultural depictions, or something else?
For many possible outcomes, we have real data. We have many cases of a species being removed from an ecosystem, and of a subspecies being removed. Some of those are because of humans causing extinctions (or near extinctions), some of it is from humans causing the removal of a species from an area, and some of it is from natural change in ecosystems that is not the cause of humans (the world is not static, species evolve, evolutions and natural phenomena such as weather patterns allow species to spread to new areas).
That's probably what they thought back then, too. We don't know what we don't know; this isn't some scifi story where we can make mistakes and still get a happy ending.
> That's probably what they thought back then, too.
Sure, after purging hundreds of thousands of "counterrevolutionary" scientists and other intellectuals.
We're in a slightly different scenario now. Our understanding of ecological impacts from this sort of action is well advanced past that of Maoist China. It may not be perfect, but it's certainly better.
I think the point is that every generation thinks they're smart enough to wield the powers of the day. Humans have been wrong many, many times about that presumption.
We can't look into the future to realize how much or little we actually know right now. You can only look back and remark on how foolish people were a few decades or centuries ago.
No, I suppose not. But it just sets off warning bells when someone says there's "no risk" in an endeavor that hasn't been tried before.
The only way to "undo" this I can think of is to introduce large enough swarms of natural mosquitos to overwhelm the population of GMO mosquitos. Now, you're worse off than before. So fingers crossed that it works. It'll be a great achievement though if it does.
Go live in Mozambique. Get malaria a few times, watch children get malaria, and then tell me again of your passion for that one strain of mosquitoes out of dozens, which carries malaria.
There are actually 3000 species of mosquito. 100 species are capable of transmitting malaria, but only 30-40 commonly do. 7 species are responsible for transmitting the most dangerous form of malaria.
Mosquitos have killed more of your ancestors[0] than anything else. To use your Nazi metaphor they probably look at themselves in a manner similar to the people who landed on Omaha beach in 1941.
[0]"The general consensus of demographers is that about 108 billion human beings have ever lived, and that mosquito-borne diseases have killed close to half—52 billion people, the majority of them young children."
https://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/mosquito-killed-billio...
This sort of flamebait will get you banned here. Please read the rules and stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We've had to warn you about this kind of thing before. That's not cool.
Note this guideline:
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
”Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”
-Kurt Vonnegut
Because writers generally /hate/ to write about a better world as a result of a new technology as they see it as boring and somehow disrespectful to real problems.
Look at how "cure for cancer gone wrong" is a cliché for causing undead monsters in modern times, how people missed the point of a Bond Villain plot creating a universal flu vaccine as cover for a plan to create a world devestating pandemic and concluded that a flu which contains all possible immune triggers to make a vaccine produce antibodies for all of them would be a hazard instead of a cover story.
Personally I am so goddamned sick and tired of the "Frankenstein complex" where any new technology is treated as a nascent apocalypse and "they should have known better than to make an axe because somebody would use it to cleave a skull" mentality.
My personal context is that my grandfather was president of the Florida mosquito control board, who sprays enormous quantities of pesticides into nature in order to protect human health, and my mother, who works for the CDC on infectious diseases in sub-saharan Africa and South America.
The subset of disease carrying mosquitos are the most deadly disease vector to humans worldwide, and have no consequential energy contribution back to the bottom of the food chain. If you are worried about the food security of an animal or insect who only eats these disease carrying mosquitos, consider the magnitude greater number of insect species pushed near extinction or vastly reduced by our use of pesticides for mosquito control.
With this work, we move one step closer to being able to eliminate disease carrying mosquitos, leave the rest of the mosquito species alone, and finally stop spraying so much pesticide (that causes untold ecological damage) into nature and near human habitation.
While contrarianism is a valuable american (and human) trait, in this situation it is misplaced, mis-informed, and dangerous. An educated man's anti-vaxx, if you will.
Imagine the equatorial portions of the world without malaria, west-nile, yellow-fever, and dengue. Eliminating the largest amount of untold human and animal misery since the invention of anti-biotics, while stopping the indiscriminate use of devastating quantities of pesticides that destroy and distort ecosystems.
These diseases do not only kill, but physically main and mentally injure their hosts for the rest of their lives. In the developed world we are lucky not to have these issues due to pesticides, medicine, and a generally cold climate.
The equatorial countries are often impoverished, and the people who live there suffer from these diseases much more than we do. The contribution of persistent mosquito borne diseases to poverty is enormous and difficult to quantify.
I believe it is only from the most sheltered contexts and outlooks that one can oppose this measure of progress. If you oppose this test think twice - please reconsider. If your opposition is effective, people will die and suffer needlessly.