Word: mosquito
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...left. I was looking around seeing this place I had grown up farming, seeing the place where I used to play as a little boy." Today Kumar, his wife and four children are crammed into an 8 m by 5 m shack located in the middle of a mosquito-infested mangrove swamp. Around them is a garbage tip of old tyres, tins and broken-up asbestos sheeting; human waste fills a network of stinking open drains that regularly overflow during high tide. Kumar and his wife bring in about $80 a week; a relative cares for the children...
...maintenance of power. She specializes in Southern intellectuals, like James Henry Hammond, Josiah C. Nott and Edmund Ruffin, who embraced slavery and later secession. These are complex characters whose racism was detestable, but who also fought hard to spread occasionally live-saving ideas: Nott promoted the fight against the mosquito to limit malaria, and Ruffin was an agronomist who advocated agricultural lime...
This is not meant as a moral question, although some would have moral qualms with this technology. Mosquitoes, one might argue, are a product of nature (or a deity) and ought not to be altered for humans’ benefit. Thankfully, few subscribe to this argument. Saving millions of human lives each year is a far higher priority than preserving the integrity of the mosquito genome out of respect for the genome itself...
...more important question is a scientific one. We need to ask if adding a new gene to every mosquito on the planet will have negative consequences that outweigh the decreased transmission of malaria. The short answer is that we don’t know—we need more research and larger-scale experiments—though we do have a little experience in wholesale genetic modifcations...
Forming and operating such a body may be difficult—the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is evidence enough of how easily scientific decisions can become politicized. But it’s worth thinking about now. If a bigger, better malaria-resistant mosquito arrives next year, it would be a tragedy of epic proportions to spend years arguing about who should deliberate its release. We don’t yet have the magic malaria bullet, but we can think about human institutions in the mean time...