Welcome to Entanglements. In this episode, hosts Brooke Borel and Anna Rothschild ask: Should we unleash GMO mosquitoes? The technology to make these insects has gotten better and easier in recent years, raising ecological and ethical quandaries.
To dig in, our hosts invited two experts with differing opinions to share their points of view, in an effort to find some common ground. The point isn’t to both-sides an issue or to try to force agreement. Instead, the show aims to explore the nuance and subtleties that are often overlooked in heated online forums or in debate-style media.
Their guests this week are Omar Akbari, a molecular biologist, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and the co-founder of the companies Agragene and Synvect and Jennifer Kuzma, a social scientist and policy expert at North Carolina State University and co-director of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center.
Below is the full transcript of the podcast, lightly edited for clarity. New episodes drop every Monday through the end of the year. You can also subscribe to Entanglements at Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Brooke Borel: Welcome to Entanglements, the show where we explore scientific controversies and try and find common ground. I’m Brooke Borel, articles editor at Undark Magazine.
Anna Rothschild: And I’m science journalist Anna Rothschild.
Brooke Borel: Today we’re asking: Should we unleash genetically modified insects?
Anna Rothschild: Right. We may soon have the power to wipe out certain diseases, like malaria, by tweaking the genes of the mosquitoes that spread them. But the big question is: Should we?
Brooke Borel: Right. Now, you might be thinking: Why are we asking this question today? Haven’t we been genetically modifying stuff for decades? And, yeah, we have. We have. But in the past few years, the technology has gotten much, much better and much, much easier.
Anna Rothschild: Exactly.
Brooke Borel: And that raises a whole bunch of ecological and ethical issues, which I explored with my guests today. You ready to dive in, Anna?
Anna Rothschild: Absolutely. Let’s do it.
[Music]
Brooke Borel: So the question for today is: Should we unleash GMO bugs? So, should we?
Omar Akbari: Yes, absolutely.
Brooke Borel: This is Omar Akbari. He’s a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and the co-founder of the companies Agragene and Synvect. His work focuses on using genetic technologies to target pests, like mosquitoes.
Omar Akbari: What we’re trying to do is develop technologies now that are safe and effective and can be used almost immediately. And in addition to that, we’re also developing technologies that are more long term. These technologies might be a little bit more controversial. They might take longer to get approved, but we’re still working on those in the lab. That technology is what people call gene drive. And if you link a beneficial trait to the gene drive, then you could essentially modify the entire population rather quickly.
Brooke Borel: I feel like here I should probably explain what a gene drive is.
Anna Rothschild: Oh, actually, I made a video about this like 8 years ago when the technology was super new. Can I actually take a crack at describing it?
Brooke Borel: Yeah, of course, be my guest.
Anna Rothschild: Cool. Thank you. So, I think to explain this well, you first need to understand a problem with traditional genetic modification. And I’m going to vastly over-simplify this, but basically, new genes tend to get weeded out of a population really fast, unless they’re beneficial to the species and help them have more babies. And that’s actually true regardless of whether it’s a genetically modified gene, or something that just arises naturally, like a new mutation.
Brooke Borel: Right, just to give an example, say you give mosquitoes a gene that keeps them from transmitting malaria. Because bugs like mosquitoes reproduce sexually, their babies get one set of genes from each parent. So if you breed one of your GMO mosquitoes with a wild mosquito, all the babies will get one copy of the malaria-resistant gene, and then one normal copy of the gene. If you pair one of those babies with a wild mosquito, just half of their kids will get the GMO gene. And then in the next generation, even fewer babies will have the new gene. And then over time, that gene could get diluted out and disappear altogether.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, exactly. The beauty of gene drives though is that they make sure that a new gene stays in a population. They take many forms, but one common approach is to use a technology called CRISPR-Cas9, which basically lets you cut and paste genetic information. So when a genetically modified mosquito mates with a wild mosquito, the gene drive cuts out the normal version of the gene in the developing embryo and replaces it with a genetically modified one. I realize that’s probably kind of confusing, I get it. But the important thing to know is that every baby will be malaria resistant. And so will their grandbabies and great-grandbabies and so on forever.
Brooke Borel: At least in theory, right — but more on that in a moment though. Anyway, in this way, a gene would spread through the population very rapidly because mosquitoes make babies very quickly. Each generation takes just about 2 weeks.
Anna Rothschild: Jeez, so fast.
Brooke Borel: I know. So you can imagine how fast a gene like this could spread through the population. Which of course means it’s also very hard to stop if something goes wrong.
Anna Rothschild: Right.
Brooke Borel: Omar’s a bit of a pioneer in this space. He says his lab has developed more gene drives than any other. And they’ve used them to create mosquitoes that are unable to transmit dengue, which is a virus that affects up to 400 million people a year. So the scenario you’ve just described is not speculative — it actually exists today. But so far, Omar has not released any of these mosquitoes out into the world.
Omar Akbari: It’s quite effective and it can work, but it’s also controversial in that once you release it, it’s going to spread. It’s going to spread beyond borders and there may be unintended consequences. And so it’s kind of a little bit difficult to measure some of those consequences in the laboratory. So this is the reason why our lab is also working on developing very safe and effective approaches that can be used now that involve using CRISPR to actually generate sterile males, for example.
Brooke Borel: Why do you feel like that’s a safer approach?
Omar Akbari: What we’ve done is we’ve generated an approach where you can use CRISPR just like you would in a gene drive, but instead you design it to target two genes, one that kills females and one that makes males sterile.
Brooke Borel: Which means that with this technique, you ensure that every egg hatches a male mosquito. And importantly, female mosquitoes are the only ones that bite. They need blood to produce eggs. But male mosquitoes are exclusively vegetarians. They eat plant nectar. So, when you release the genetically modified males, they won’t bite anyone and they can’t have babies — but that doesn’t stop them from trying.
Omar Akbari: So these males that get released, they’ll find females, wild females, they’ll mate with them, and those females will no longer produce progeny. So over time, what happens is, as you continually release and inundate the population with these sterile males, the population starts to decline, and you could actually achieve eradication and elimination of that species in that area just by releasing these sterilized males, which are really good at finding females, actually. So you basically are using the mosquito to control the mosquito, which is really powerful.
Brooke Borel: So is this safer or less risky because you could always shut it down if you wanted to just by not releasing more of these sterile males?
Omar Akbari: Exactly, because these are self limiting. So these males, there’s — I think of them as like dead ends, right? Because they’re not going to reproduce, they’re sterile, and they’re just going to mate with females, and they’re going to die, and they’re going to be gone, right? They’re not going to persist, so the genetic machinery we’re using to create these sterile males is not going to be passed on in the population in any way. It’s just a basically genetic trick to create sterilized males.
Anna Rothschild: Creating sterile males for pest control is not a new idea, right?
Brooke Borel: Right. Back in the 1960s, the U.S. actually eradicated an agricultural pest called the screwworm by subjecting the males to radiation that made them infertile. We do this with mosquitoes too, but it doesn’t work as well. The method requires separating the adult males from the females, which is just really hard to do.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, that sounds very tough.
Brooke Borel: Yeah mosquitoes are tiny. And they’re also fragile, right, radiation is hard on their little bodies. But with Omar’s technique, you could just ship boxes of genetically modified eggs out to an area where a mosquito-borne illness is a problem.
Anna Rothschild: Right, ‘cause you know all the eggs are gonna be male.
Brooke Borel: Yeah, and then you just keep dropping off boxes of these eggs until the population dies out.
Omar Akbari: One really nice thing about population suppression is that if you can remove the mosquito, you can also prevent transmission. And in addition to that, you also prevent mosquito bites, which people don’t like. You know, even if you’re not getting pathogens being transmitted, like, here in California for example, I have A. aegypti in my backyard, right? And so, during the day they bite my ankles if I go out there and it’s annoying. It’s really annoying. I hate it. But everybody hates being bitten by a mosquito. Right? And so, I think for mosquito control, you want suppression. Even if they can’t transmit these pathogens, which, which would be great, it’s still not acceptable that they’re biting you. Right? Like, in my opinion.
And if you can block dengue in A. aegypti they can still transmit chikungunya, they can still transmit yellow fever, they can still transmit Zika virus. You have to be able to block the transmission of all pathogens. And there’s always new pathogens emerging. And so what’s the next epidemic going to be? And, if your mosquitoes can’t transmit dengue, are they also not going to be able to transmit that one? You know, so I think it’s a better approach just to remove the mosquito. And so you can just eliminate that chance of a mosquito vectoring a pathogen. And that’s kind of what we’re working toward.
Brooke Borel: The sort of release of these sterile males that we’re talking about right now is considered the lower risk, safer approach that perhaps you could do sooner compared to the gene drive. But you’re also talking about potentially eradicating these mosquito species. What could be some unintended risks in terms of that?
Omar Akbari: So with eradication of a mosquito species, I think the first misconception that there’s like — there’s about 3,500 different mosquito species on Earth, but only a small handful of them actually transmit pathogens to us. And so what we’re talking about is just removing those ones that transmit pathogens to us. And in many cases, they’re actually invasive species — like, for example, Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, which transmit dengue, chikungunya, Zika, yellow fever — they’re present in California. Albopictus arrived in 2001, Aegypti arrived in 2013, and so they’re recent invasions. And so if you eradicated them from California, the argument would be that there really isn’t going to be any ecological consequences because they’re a recent innovation.
Brooke Borel: Of course, that’s not universally true. In sub-saharan Africa, where the burden of malaria is highest, certain malaria-carrying mosquitoes have been around for a long time. But Omar says while we can’t know for sure how eradication would affect the ecosystem, African birds and fish have lots of other mosquito species to eat.
Omar Akbari: I think the real thing you’ll see is just a really high reduction in malaria transmission.
Brooke Borel: How do you sort of think about weighing the risk and benefit for this tech.
Omar Akbari: There really isn’t a lot of risk because it’s a sterile male. The benefit is that you could achieve suppression — sustained suppression — and then you can mitigate the use of harmful insecticides. And so I think those are the real benefits and also the cost is going to be lower. I don’t really see a lot of risks with it. Honestly, I think it’s a proven technology, sterile insect technique. And the perceived risk that people have is it’s genetically modified and genetically modified is scary, and I don’t want to release anything genetically modified. That said, Oxitec has been able to achieve both regulatory authorizations and public approval for doing releases of genetically modified mosquitoes in many countries, including in the United States.
Brooke Borel: As Omar just mentioned, a company called Oxitec is using a different genetic technology — also not a gene drive — to suppress the mosquito population. So far, Oxitec has released its mosquitoes in the Florida Keys and the Cayman Islands, and some other spots.
Brooke Borel: Oxitec has also received a lot of pushback from communities and from other groups with the releases of their mosquitoes. Do you anticipate a similar pushback from at least some members of the public with your approach?
Omar Akbari: Yeah, I think so. I think anything genetically modified is going to receive some pushback. And Oxitec, you know, did receive pushback, but they’ve also have proven that their technology is effective and safe. And there really hasn’t been any negative consequences from the releases they’ve been doing over the last 10 years all over the world. And so I think, you know, despite the pushbacks, they’ve actually been quite successful and they’re releasing their system today and it’s working.
[Music]
Anna Rothschild: I’m gonna guess that not everyone is as enthused about Oxitec’s program as Omar.
Brooke Borel: How did you know.
Anna Rothschild: You know, just a hunch.
Brooke Borel: Ha, yeah, why don’t we hear from someone with that sort of take right now.
[Music]
Brooke Borel: So our big question for the day is: Should we unleash GMO bugs?
Jennifer Kuzma: I think perhaps in the future when there have been good studies done on the ecological health and environmental safety of genetically modified insects and their efficacy, then I would say yes. Especially if there is a great societal need for it. However, the data of the field trials is not often available. For example, with the Oxitec mosquito in the Florida Keys, we’re not sure how those have been working. And until I think we see data on how those experimental uses have gone, that we should refrain from additional use.
Brooke Borel: That’s Jennifer Kuzma. She’s a professor at North Carolina State University and the co-director of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center there.
Brooke Borel: What are the biggest risks in your opinion to releasing GMO insects?
Jennifer Kuzma: It depends on the particular change that you’re making in the insect and the habitat and the way that you’re releasing the insects. So to me, some of the biggest risks are ecological in a sense where you could potentially drive down a food source for different predators. So that would be one. And then the second if you’re using a self killing system where you want the population to be driven down, you could potentially open up an ecological niche for a more harmful carrier of a disease.
Brooke Borel: In other words, if you eradicate one species of disease-carrying mosquito, perhaps another one will take over and cause even worse disease.
Anna Rothschild: What about another issue, like good old fashioned pathogen resistance. You know? If you expose bacteria to an antibiotic, the bacteria will die until some of them mutate and evolve to combat the drug. That’s how you end up with antibiotic resistant bacteria.
Brooke Borel: Yeah that’s a really good point. And that’s a huge issue with genetic modification, too — the resistance can break your system. And then you’ve spent millions of dollars to release bugs that don’t work.
Jennifer Kuzma: So I think that’s the constant challenge that these developers will be faced with, is the constant evolution of resistance, no matter if it’s a gene drive or it’s a self killing system.
Brooke Borel: Talking specifically about using CRISPR or another technology to genetically sterilize mosquitoes, is there any world in which you would call that safe?
Jennifer Kuzma: The problem with safety is that it’s never 100 percent. And almost any action we take in an ecosystem is going to come with some sort of level of risk. I think a better question is: Is it safe enough to warrant the potential benefits? And so we’re never going to be able to account for all the uncertainties with the release of genetically modified insects. But are we being precautious enough that we’ve done our due diligence? And been transparent about it with the public and outside experts — because for me, that’s my biggest criticism of the system — in order to really say we’ve done what we can to ensure a very high level of safety to release this.
Brooke Borel: Are there some technologies that you’re more worried about than others in terms of risk within that umbrella of GMO?
Jennifer Kuzma: Yeah, I do think that the gene drive has special considerations in that if it’s not a self limited gene drive, it could potentially have a more permanent effect on the ecosystem. And it could potentially spread more in ecosystems where just a few organisms, if they got outside the experimental area, could affect a different region that you didn’t want it to affect. Because sometimes pests in one region are actually desirable in other regions. That’s why I think we need to take an extra level of caution with gene drives, even more so than regular genetically modified organisms that are designed to drive the population down.
Brooke Borel: So, just to clarify what Jennifer means by self-limiting: Some scientists are building gene drives with safety valves where they basically shut themselves off at some point, to keep them from spreading out of control.
Brooke Borel: If that particular approach, the gene drive approach, is riskier and of more concern, is there value to researching it at all in a lab if it, even if it never gets released into the wild? What’s the use of that kind of research if it is perhaps too risky?
Jennifer Kuzma: Well I think there may be some cases in the future where there is really something so devastating that we’re willing to overlook the potential ecological risk for the benefits that we might need at that time. You know, if you think of the Covid and the Covid pandemic — something on that level, either in an agricultural outbreak or a public health outbreak, might really call for some drastic measure.
Brooke Borel: I guess I’m curious, how do we as a society or whoever is going to be able to have a democratic voice in something like that decide how to gauge how bad something is? Because of course, malaria is already very deadly and in some parts of the world the number one cause of death. So how do we make those decisions when it comes to gene drive, for example, in these riskier technologies?
Jennifer Kuzma: Well, I think that’s a great point. I do think that should be more of a societal decision. And I’m not saying that’s necessarily everybody voting on it. But I do believe there should be a level of public awareness and input into any decision like that. And the way that we operate right now, those decisions are made exclusively between the product developer and really the regulators.
Brooke Borel: In terms of what the regulatory framework is in the U.S. then, what do we have on the books here that can regulate this stuff?
Jennifer Kuzma: Well, that’s an interesting question because it’s really going to depend on the purpose of the gene drive product. Let’s just take mosquitoes, for example. Currently there was an agreement, I think it was 2017, where the FDA and the EPA kind of split up genetically modified mosquitoes depending on the claims that the developer is making. So for example, if you’re developing a genetically modified mosquito to improve public health, that’s a disease claim, then it would go to the FDA. However, if you’re producing a genetically modified mosquito to bring down the mosquito pest population, it would go to the EPA as a pesticide. Gene drives for agricultural pests, they’re likely to go through the Department of Agriculture, because the Department of Agriculture has authority for plant pests. So it’s quite confusing.
Anna Rothschild: OK, that’s wild to me.
Brooke Borel: Yeah and we see this a lot, right? We have old regulations and then new tech comes out and it’s kind of a mismatch.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah exactly. I mean, just for this example though, none of these agencies seem perfectly equipped to handle all of the various issues that go along with genetically modified animals.
Brooke Borel: Yeah. Like, the FDA doesn’t typically have to do the same sorts of environmental assessments the EPA does. And how can we expect them to do that well for a genetically modified mosquito?
Anna Rothschild: Not to mention that the EPA doesn’t typically have to regulate a pesticide with wings that can, you know, cross international borders.
Brooke Borel: Yeah, and by the way, the U.S. hasn’t ratified the U.N.’s agreements concerning genetically modified animals.
Anna Rothschild: Oh, of course.
Brooke Borel: Yeah, so regulators are really the last line of defense for any GMOs that get released here.
Brooke Borel: So if the Oxitec mosquito example is what sort of has paved the way for how these things are regulated or observed by regulators — how does that bode for future releases, in your opinion?
Jennifer Kuzma: To me, not very good. The public and even outside experts have had really no window into how those experimental use trials have gone on in Florida. The data is not available, and we don’t even know what the efficacy is from a public standpoint. But yet. They’re applying for a permanent, you know, registration of the product.
Brooke Borel: We reached out to Oxitec for comment. The company has applied for a permanent registration with the Environmental Protection Agency to release their mosquitoes on a wider scale. And they told us they aren’t releasing their data until after the regulatory process is complete.
Jennifer Kuzma: If gene drives goes that way, that would really actually frighten me. And I think many of the gene drive developers are trying to be more inclusive of the public, doing more public engagement, proceeding with more precaution. But as far as the first generation of GMO insects has gone in regulation, it has not been a stellar example of transparency and trust.
[Music]
Anna Rothschild: I’m so curious to know what Omar thinks about the current regulations. You know, he seemed to look at Oxitec as a pretty positive example of what you can do with genetic modification in insects. But I wonder if his take on the policy side is different.
Brooke Borel: Well, I brought them together to talk about that and more.
Anna Rothschild: Ah, you smarty pants.
Brooke Borel: Thanks.
[Music]
Brooke Borel: So I want to talk about policy and regulation. I’m curious to see where you overlap or disagree. Both of you brought up Oxitec in your separate interviews. Of course this is the example of a genetically modified mosquito that has gone through some regulatory processes here in the U.S. Omar, maybe you could start. What do you draw from this example as you look towards potentially commercializing your own products?
Omar Akbari: I think they’ve made a lot of mistakes over the years. I think the first big one was when they went into the Cayman Islands and deployed without getting any kind of public acceptance. They got regulatory authorization, but not any public acceptance. I know we clearly would never do something like that, you know, we definitely would engage as far as we can, you know, and make it very obvious that we’re doing these deployments.
Brooke Borel: Just a note from our email with Oxitec: The company says that they did engage with the public over the Cayman Islands project. But there has also been quite a lot of criticism saying that it wasn’t enough.
Omar Akbari: Being as transparent as possible, I think is another thing. Like the fact that the data is not available is, you know — the trials have been done, it’s been years now. So why isn’t it available? Why aren’t they publishing it? Why aren’t they making it accessible? You know, I think those are things that I hope we don’t make those kind of mistakes, and I don’t think we will. And those are just a couple examples I can think of off the top of my head.
Brooke Borel: But as far as the regulations that are in place right now, do you think they’re adequate to make sure that these products, for lack of a better word, are safe and effective to release?
Omar Akbari: I think for gene drive, we’re definitely not there. But I think for assessing whether a sterile insect technique is safe — I mean, they do do a risk assessment, they ask you to perform studies on risks associated with human health or non-target organisms or gene flow or insecticide resistance. So there are things that they require you to provide and, and data. Is that enough, I don’t know. I mean, I feel like it’s a lot.
Brooke Borel: What do you think, Jennifer?
Jennifer Kuzma: Yeah, well, I think it depends on what regulatory pathway the technology goes down. And I think of the three agencies, it’s usually the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, that requires the most data from what I’ve seen. So I’m not entirely happy with the regulatory system. But the biggest complaint I have is this ability to keep the conversation between the product developer — the technology developer — and the agency staff, and that in no places, there are a way to open up that conversation to outside experts and communities.
Anna Rothschild: Interesting. So it seems like they’re actually more aligned on regulation than I would have thought, at least with some techniques.
Brooke Borel: Yeah, at the very least they have some of the same concerns.
Anna Rothschild: What about gene drives though? Jennifer seems very cautious about them, but Omar is still actively creating them in his lab.
Brooke Borel: Yeah. You know, Omar’s not doing field trials with his gene drives, but other groups are trying to make that happen.
Anna Rothshild: Huh.
Brooke Borel: Yeah, the one that’s probably furthest along is planning field trials on an island nation called São Tomé and Príncipe, which is off the western coast of Central Africa. And that project — it aims to make the mosquitoes there less likely to transmit the malaria parasite.
Anna Rothschild: Interesting.
Brooke Borel: So, I spoke to a couple of the researchers on that project, and the scientists are just awaiting permission from the government to develop and release the tech on the island of Príncipe. And I tried very hard to get one of these researchers to come on this episode, but it didn’t work out.
Anna Rothschild: Oh, that’s too bad. Well what does Omar think of field testing gene drives, just generally?
Brooke Borel: Well, just listen.
Brooke Borel: You’ve created a lot of gene drives in your lab, and you’ve studied this a lot. What sort of held you back from continuing to push that more commercially, for example?
Omar Akbari: Yeah, I mean, so our lab has been studying and developing gene drives for quite a long time. And so we’re not pursuing them for any kind of field trial because I personally don’t think the technology is ready for that yet. I know some other labs think it is, but I’m not sure I agree with them. That’s one reason. The second reason is I don’t actually think it’s ethically right because I do think there are risks that we can’t measure in the lab that could happen in the field. And so until we have a good way of measuring for those risks I’m not personally ready to go forward with them.
If you look at any of these evolution experiments in lab, you always get resistance happening, whether it’s bacteria or mosquitoes, you see resistance happening really quickly. And so my biggest fear for that technology is that a lot of efforts going to go in to maybe even achieving a, you know, a trial. And it’s just not going to work. It’s just going to fail, you know, and so all that effort that was put into that could be wasted. And in addition to it’s not working, when it fails, it’s going to spread some sort of resistance into the population. And so what is that resistance going to do? Like, is it going to have any impact on the mosquito viability? Is it going to change the transmissibility of the pathogen in some way? We have no idea what it’s going to create, how it’s going to behave, and what it’s going to do. So there’s no way to really measure the risk with that. I think if you have a technology like that, that once you deploy it, you can’t control it and you don’t know what’s going to happen — it’s almost unethical to even want to push that forward in my opinion.
Jennifer Kuzma: That’s what worries me about some of these technologies as well, is that you may actually increase the disease burden, especially the population suppression technologies that are leaky when you’re releasing millions and millions of mosquitoes. I think that’s what the public worries about in general is that so many times they’ve been told a particular technology or particular drug or particular chemical is safe only to find out 20 years later that it’s not. That it’s not working, or that it’s having the opposite effect, that it’s killing them. So I think that’s why we need to proceed with a level of precaution with any technology, especially when you’re releasing something that can fly and spread and cross borders.
Brooke Borel: I’m curious how you think this has gone. Did you agree more than you were expecting? Or did you think that you more or less would actually agree more even though you kind of started it out at kind of different perspectives from our initial question?
Jennifer Kuzma: I sort of knew we would mainly agree.
Omar Akbari: Yeah, I mean, I expected us to mostly agree. I think, I mean, we actually wrote a paper together.
Jennifer Kuzma: Oh that’s right. We did. I forgot. Yes, yes. At the conference.
Brooke Borel: I didn’t know that.
Omar Akbari: Yeah.
Jennifer Kuzma: I totally remember that.
[Music]
Brooke Borel: So, I didn’t know that they wrote a paper together. That was my failure as a reporter I guess. It just didn’t come up during our pre-interviews.
Anna Rothschild: Oh that’s OK, Brooke, don’t beat yourself up about that.
Brooke Borel: But I think it does go to show you what a small world this is. I mean it is a pretty small group of researchers who are doing this work, both actively researching gene drives and these other genetic modification techniques in insects. And a pretty small group of researchers who are also critiquing that.
Anna Rothschild: I am curious though, did you ever think about reaching out to an ecologist? You know, there’s been very little, as we know, data released by these companies. But I’m curious if any outside groups have done assessments to try to look into the impact of releasing genetically modified mosquitoes, you know, on ecosystems and biomes.
Brooke Borel: I had a hard time finding anyone. There is an ecologist who did this kind of work many years ago who I had interviewed for some other stories. She has since retired and didn’t want to come on the show because she is doing other things now. And when I was asking around I was kind of told no one else is doing that work actively right now.
Anna Rothschild: Why not?
Brooke Borel: Well, that’s a good question. And maybe I missed something, maybe there is somebody out there. If you’re out there, send me an email. But from what I gather in talking to many different people for this episode, you know, a lot of the funding for this kind of research is really focused on getting the tech to work. And they’re not really putting that money into: What are the potential downsides? They are putting money into: We want to, you know, cure malaria. We want to get rid of malaria.
Anna Rothschild: Right.
Brooke Borel: And there are a lot of high stakes there, right? A lot of people die and get sick every year from malaria. And, you know, there are a lot of accolades that could happened for the groups that are able to eradicate it, if that ends up happening.
Anna Rothschild: Of course.
Brooke Borel: So I think that’s part of it. And also, as I mentioned, I think one of the most contentious areas in this research is probably the gene drive technology.
Anna Rothschild: Right.
Brooke Borel: And even amongst the researchers who are working in that area, whether with mosquitoes or with other organisms, there’s disagreement on whether the world is ready and the technology is ready for field trials. I did want to get some of the people who are actively working towards field trials in conversation with other folks who are maybe a little more skeptical about that. And you know, I would find one person on one side willing to speak, but then another person not willing to speak to that one. And it just got a little complicated and I wasn’t able to find the right combo of people who would speak to each other. And I think that is in part because it is such a small world and a lot of people are getting funding from the same sources. And it just gets a little tough.
Anna Rothschild: Well, I’m curious what our listeners think about all of this. If you guys have some thoughts please send us an email at [email protected]
Brooke Borel: Yeah. And let’s end it there. And that’s it for this episode of Entanglements, brought to you by Undark magazine, which is published by the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT. The show is fact checked by Undark deputy editor Jane Reza. Our production editor is Amanda Grennell, and Adriana Lacy is our audience engagement editor. Special thanks to our editor in chief, Tom Zeller Jr. I’m Brooke Borel.
Anna Rothschild: And I’m Anna Rothschild. Thanks for listening. See you next time.