Word: wildes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...mosquitoes may block malaria transmission, but who decides when to release them into the wild...
...malarial parasite from infecting it. The team recently discovered unexpectedly that one of their engineered mosquito strains is “fitter” than ordinary mosquitoes. Once you infect it with a certain strain of mouse-borne malaria parasite, it lives longer and produces more offspring than infected wild-type mosquitoes. Place equal numbers of the two types of mosquitoes into the same cage, let the birds and the bees do their thing for a few generations, and the bioengineered insects take over, accounting for 70 percent of the mosquito population...
...been largely positive: vastly increased food supplies. But the effects of modified insects are largely unknown. Would insect predators be affected? Would the mosquitoes better transmit other illnesses? More research is needed, but some effects might not be known unless the mosquitoes are actually allowed to breed in the wild...
What would happen if these newfangled mosquitoes were released into the wild? The hope is that the modified mosquitoes would out-compete the existing ones, and the bulk of the mosquito population would be malaria resistant, thus preventing new human malaria infections. It’s not beyond the realm of possibilities that the engineered mosquitoes could entirely replace the wild ones. This solution would be simple and inexpensive. It would not rely on vaccinating entire human populations nor spraying pesticides to control mosquitoes. It would use mosquitoes to fight mosquitoes...
...technology isn’t nearly ready to take flight. The mosquito species that Jacobs-Lorena used is not the most harmful of mosquito species and the parasite used does not infect humans. Furthermore, the modified mosquitoes only have an evolutionary advantage over infected mosquitoes, and in the wild only a small fraction of mosquitoes are infected with malaria...