February 24, 2016
Interview, linked below, courtesy of LSI Executive Council member, Kirk Hartley. Original story by Arianna Monteverdi, mendelspod.com
For approximately a decade, in the cultural city of Oxford, England a synthetic biology company called Oxitec has been busily engineering mosquitoes to combat the spread of diseases like malaria, dengue, and now zika. Field trial results have proven positive for the company with a 90 percent success rate in mosquito population control. The company distinguishes its technology from “gene drive” technology in that its technology does not impose a change across entire populations, generation after generation, thereby arguably giving those concerned with these types of technologies a greater degree of comfort. On that note, Oxitec is quick to point out that animal engineering technologies should not be lumped together and viewed as a single product, rather, they are “different products, doing different things,” some which may be safer than others, as noted by Oxitec CEO Hadyn Parry in this interview. The synthetically engineered mosquito is engineered by Oxitec such that any offspring of the male mosquito will die, disabling the transmission of a mosquito-borne disease or virus. Females, as the “biters” are not released, only the males.
Interestingly, one of the arguments advanced by Oxitec is that instead of using a gene drive to, say, kill off the malaria parasite in a mosquito, it makes sure that the mosquito does not even get the chance to live in the first place. However, one can imagine, and some have gone on to do more than imagine, a gene drive that results in infertility, thereby producing the same results as the Oxitec technology. In this case, a different product doing the same thing as opposed to a “different product doing different things.” However, given that Oxitec has already conducted field trials it is well ahead of the game and perhaps, as discussed in the linked interview, does not have to worry about gene drive technology encroaching on its territory.
At the end of the day, what still has to be determined, though who knows how, is whether killing off populations of disease-spreading mosquitoes may result in a worse fate for humanity and the ecosystem. Maybe tweaking genes to disable the virus rather than terminating entire mosquito populations is a better bet. What are the chances that a novel pathogen and host are patiently waiting for the mosquito to die off to inflict even greater harms? On the flip side, if it turns out that engineering these pests to die (or tweaking their genes) is a great thing with no unintentional environmental or human health repercussions, have we unleashed a bigger beast, namely, the potential intentional bad use of such technologies?