Mosquito War: Voters Approve the Release of Genetically Modified Organisms
This article from futurism.com may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:
As Tuesday’s presidential votes were cast, Monroe County, part of the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District also voted to use genetically modified mosquitoes to fight their Zika-carrying cousins. The engineered mosquitoes were courtesy of British biotech company Oxitec, and received approval for trials from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last August.
Monroe County would be the first in the US to carry out these trials. Oxitec CEO Hadyn Parry is optimistic, saying that the “ultimate goal of the trial is to prove what we say we can do, which is reduce the population significantly.” Previous reports indicate that these factory-made mosquitoes can effectively reduce Zika-carrying mosquito population by 90%.
By some measures malaria has killed more people than any other disease in humanity’s history. It is one of the primary contributing factors to the enormous challenge of sustaining economic development in the tropics and humanity has struggled to overcome the challenge represented by malaria for millennia. It has taken a separate virus threatening the unborn children of first world parents to galvanise support for a campaign to deliberately target the offending parasite; certain genus’ of which have evolved specifically to target humans, .
There are obvious risks with releasing genes engineered by humans into the wild. I learned at the MIT EmTech conference in October that some impressive work has been done in limiting the spread of genetically altered insects and mammals by introducing what is called a daisy-chain into the CRISPR edited gene drive. This means that once the mosquitoes, or rats in the case of limiting Lyme disease, have been released the trait which contributes to infertility will breed out in about 10 generations. That succeeds in limiting the extent to which the manmade mutation can travel but also ensures a source of ongoing profitability for the companies creating these solutions.
US listed Intrexon is the parent company of Oxitec and it rallied this week to test the upper side of a developing six-month range. A sustained break above $30 would signal a return to demand dominance beyond the short term.