But what if there was a sense in which you really could tell the future? And what if we could also make a particular outcome more likely, even certain? The emerging technology known as gene drives offers just such a prospect for favoring particular traits in future plants and animals—to increase agricultural output, to reduce the risk of infectious disease transmission, or something we haven’t yet imagined. Indeed, some have already suggested using gene drives to eliminate certain mosquitoes that can spread Zika, malaria, and other ailments. But is that a good idea? How should we think about employing such a technology in ways that anticipate, and weigh, its benefits and harms for current and future generations?

Over the past year, at the request of the National Institutes of Health and the Foundation for the NIH, a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine considered these questions. Last month, the committee, which I co-chaired with Elizabeth Heitman from the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, released its report—“Gene Drives on the Horizon: Advancing Science, Navigating Uncertainty, and Aligning Research with Public Values.” So what did we conclude? I will get to that in a minute, but first, a lesson on the science.

Gene drive technology allows scientists to alter the normal rules—odds, if you will—of genetic inheritance in sexual reproduction. Through gene drives, we can significantly enhance the chances (from nature’s 50-50 odds in most sexually reproducing species) of a particular gene being passed to an offspring. The gene drive technology combines an altered genetic trait, such as producing a male, with an increased likelihood the trait passes throughout a population.

This is a new tool in a well-established pursuit. Inheritance is an area in which humans put a lot of effort into managing future outcomes. Breeders may work for years or decades to ensure that characters such as a plant’s seed size, or a horse’s strength or speed, pass predictably from generation to generation. How predictably? Well, throughout history the essence of “good breeding” is making passage of a desirable trait between generations as reliable as possible.

It was only in the late 1800s, however, that experiments with pea plants by an Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel, raised the prospect that managing the passage of traits between generations could move beyond best practices or even best guesses. Mendel demonstrated that for at least some parental traits he could predict the average frequency with which they would occur in offspring. For example, if parent plants in a sexually reproducing species had red flowers or yellow seeds, a prediction might be that half of all offspring would have red flowers or yellow seeds. It was a remarkable advance. By early in the 20th century, Mendel’s results were among the fundamental insights leading to the science of genetics.

Geneticists work to reveal the rules of inheritance by understanding the processes that link an individual’s DNA, or genotype, to the expression of a particular trait, the phenotype of a developing organism or an adult. This requires understanding the molecular and environmental variables controlling an outcome, such as having a male or female offspring. We know that in most species with two sexes, we can expect on average the offspring generation will have about half males and half females. This is a basic rule of inheritance. Absent forces such as gene mutation or natural selection, the frequency of many traits in the offspring generation will equal that of the parental generation. But what if you had the technology to alter that basic rule and cause the ratio in the offspring generation to be 60:40 males to females, or 70:30, or even 99:1?

Gene drive technology opens up such possibilities. A gene drive could be designed to increase the likelihood a female produces males as opposed to females. In addition, with the passing of each generation the fraction of males in a population increases as the trait “drives” through a population—the future becomes more certain. In an extreme, much or all of a population could become males, and of course for a species with sexual reproduction the result would be reduction or elimination of a population, or even extinction of a species.

But should gene drives be used to alter population sizes, perhaps to the point of extinction? On the upside, gene drive modified organisms hold the promise of improving human health and agricultural productivity, conserving other species, and advancing basic research. Imagine eliminating a mosquito species that carries malaria.

There are, however, possible downsides to releasing gene drive modified organisms in natural ecosystems. How should we consider using such gene drive power? What should we consider before deciding whether to use it?

The NIH committee report issued in June devotes a lot of attention to responsible science and the need for continuous evaluation and assessment of the social, environmental, regulatory, and ethical considerations of releasing gene drive modified organisms into the environment. Each step in research and deployment, we emphasized, rests on values held by individuals and communities. Public engagement in pursuit of uncovering and understanding these values cannot be an afterthought. The governance of research on gene drive modified organisms should begin with the personal responsibility of the investigator and extend from there to research institutions and regulators. But what regulators: state, federal, global? After all, upon release, a gene drive modified organism is designed to spread. The borders of private property, states, or countries are not barriers to dispersal. A key message of the report is:

There is insufficient evidence available at this time to support the release of gene drive modified organisms into the environment. However, the potential benefits of gene drives for basic and applied research are significant and justify proceeding with laboratory research and highly-controlled field trials.

Some of the gaps in understanding the full impacts of gene drive technology include ecological and evolutionary processes in natural ecosystems. If we diminish or even eliminate a species like a mosquito that transmits a pathogen that infects humans, what will that mean for the ecosystem’s stability? This action, for example, may then open an opportunity for one or more additional insect species that transmit even less desirable infectious diseases to become established or increase in numbers.

The committee’s blueprint for moving forward includes a gradual framework for testing that stretches from laboratory development to field release and monitoring of gene drive modified organisms. We recommended ecological risk assessment as a method for quantifying how a specific change or changes in the environment will affect something of value to society—such as water quality or the chance that an unwanted pest species that transmits an infectious pathogen might become established.

Controlling the future of inheritance across entire populations and species is a powerful scientific advance, one that is hard to overstate. And, as often happens, there is a risk of scientific research outpacing the development of a broader ethical framework to determine whether, and how best, to deploy this newly acquired scientific power. Let’s hope scientists, and governments everywhere, heed the report’s call to proceed with caution. The promise of gene drive technology is immense, but when we’re talking about the power to make certain species extinct, it’s a technology we can’t afford to misuse.

The post How to Control the Incredible Promise and Profound Power of Gene Drive Technology appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Before 1492, Aedes aegypti did not live in the Americas. It came from West Africa as part of the Columbian Exchange, probably on ships of the transatlantic slave trade. The mosquito gradually colonized those parts of the Americas that suited its feeding and breeding requirements, and for centuries served as the primary carrier for yellow fever and dengue, viruses that are cousins of Zika.

Aedes aegypti is a peculiar and fussy mosquito. It has a strong preference for human blood—rare but not unique among mosquitoes—which makes it an efficient spreader of human disease. It lays its eggs in artificial water containers such as pots, cans, barrels, wells, or cisterns. This preference for human activities distinguishes it from the thousands of other mosquito species. Aedes aegypti is, in effect, a domesticated animal.

Together these mosquitoes and their fevers decided the fate of empires. In 1697, the kingdom of Scotland attempted to establish a trading colony on the Caribbean shore of Panama. New Caledonia was intended to position Scots to take advantage of Pacific and Atlantic trade networks. A large share of the liquid capital of Scotland and 2,500 eager volunteers went into the effort. Within two years, however, some 70 percent of the Scots were dead of “fever.” The Scots’ immune systems were unprepared for yellow fever, dengue, and malaria—any or all of which might have attacked them—and they paid the price. So did Scotland, which in 1707 accepted union with England partly to pay debts incurred by the disaster.

These tiny mosquitoes and their tinier viruses helped to undermine the grand plans of empires in the Americas for the next century. In 1763, France had just lost Canada in war to Britain and hoped to regain its position in the Americas with a new colony in what is now French Guiana. Some 11,000 hopeful souls were recruited from France and elsewhere in Europe. Like the hapless Scots, their immune systems had no previous experience of yellow fever or dengue (and in most cases none of malaria either). They too sailed into prime Aedes habitat. Within 18 months, 85 to 90 percent of them had died from disease, with yellow fever playing the largest role.

The British also lost thousands of troops to mosquito-borne fevers. They tried to take the Spanish strongholds of Cartegena (Colombia) and Santiago de Cuba in 1741 and ’42, but gave up after diseases killed most of their soldiers. Twenty years later, in another war, yellow fever proved a disaster when they finally took Havana. The lexicographer and man of letters Samuel Johnson wrote, “May my country never be cursed with another such conquest!” At the subsequent peace conference, Britain eagerly handed Havana back to Spain.

By the end of the 18th century, the mosquitoes were not just intervening in imperial schemes; they were helping the Americas win their liberty. Yellow fever and malaria ravaged European armies sent to prevent revolution in what is now Haiti and Venezuela, leading to the creation of independent countries.

Even the U.S. owes its independence in part to mosquitoes and malaria. In 1780, the southern colonies, a region with widespread malaria, became a decisive theater in the American Revolution. British troops had almost no experience with malaria, and thus no resistance to it. American militiamen and much of the Continental Army, had grown up in the South and faced malaria every summer of their lives. So in the summer of 1780, the British Army hosted its own malaria epidemic, which was particularly intense in the South Carolina low country. At times, half the British Army was too sick to move. No one knew that mosquitoes carried malaria, and the British did not have the means to combat it.

In 1781, the British commander in the South, Lord Cornwallis, decided to move his army north into the hills of Virginia in order to avoid “the fatal sickness which so nearly ruined the army” the summer before. His superiors, however, ordered him to move to the tidewater, and so in June, Cornwallis dug in at Yorktown.

In the warm months, mosquitoes (including a malaria vector species called Anopheles quadrimaculatus) started to bite and by late summer of 1781, malaria had taken hold of his army once again. Some 51 percent of his men were too sick to stand duty, unable to conduct the counter-siege operations that Cornwallis knew were required. American and French forces penned the troops in until Cornwallis surrendered in October, which in effect decided the outcome of the American Revolution.

The Continental Army and its French allies stayed healthy until the surrender, mainly because they had only recently arrived in Virginia (from New England) and malaria had not had time to do its worst. (Many of them were also resistant from prior experience with malaria). Thus, mosquitoes and malaria helped win American independence.

Mosquitoes only lost their political importance after medical researchers realized that they were spreading the fevers. The first to publish the idea that Aedes aegypti could carry yellow fever was a Cuban doctor, Carlos Finlay. U.S. military doctors led by Walter Reed confirmed Finlay’s hypothesis. Armed with this knowledge, when the U.S. Army occupied Cuba (after 1898) and Panama (after 1903) they made life miserable for Aedes aegypti—covering up water containers and putting a drop of kerosene into those without covers. Within a couple of years, mosquito control had banished yellow fever from Cuba and Panama’s Canal Zone.

Over the next 70 years or so, mosquito control acquired even more weapons. Insecticides, such as DDT—brought to bear in the 1940s—proved deadly to all mosquitoes (and many other creatures too). Aedes aegypti, because of its fondness for human settlements, fell victim to spraying campaigns more easily than did most other mosquitoes.

But Aedes aegypti control proved too successful for its own good. Once the mosquito populations had fallen drastically and the risk of yellow fever and dengue diminished, the logic of paying for continued mosquito control weakened. Budgets were redirected away from mosquito control all over the Americas. On top of that, the nasty side effects of DDT and other insecticides became well known in the 1960s.

Had the Zika virus come to the Americas in the 1930s or 1950s, its prospects would have been poor—Aedes aegypti was under control. But since the 1980s, Aedes aegypti has made a dramatic comeback in the Americas. While the main reason is the lapse in mosquito control, another reason is the warming climate, which slowly extends the range of the mosquito. Today, Zika’s chances of spreading widely among human populations via Aedes aegypti are far greater. And it will have help from Aedes albopictus, another mosquito capable of transmitting the virus, which arrived from East Asia in the 1980s. Aedes albopictus has a wider range in the U.S. than Aedes aegypti and potentially could spread Zika to more northerly states. Fortunately it is less efficient as a disease vector.

Combatting Zika will require mosquito control, and the political difficulty that arouses shows a defiant aspect of the American character to which mosquitoes and malaria gave free rein. Malaria may have helped Americans win the revolution in 1780-81, but their descendants cherish their liberty and say, in effect, “don’t tread on me” when told to cover water containers. Any attempt to spray pesticides in our democracy quickly excites opposition. Eventually, perhaps, a vaccine will sideline Zika, but until then these coming summers give the virus a chance to run amok and mosquitoes to again make history.

The post How the Lowly Mosquito Helped America Win Independence appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

They showed me a single female mosquito under the microscope. It didn’t look good: I focused up and down, trying desperately to make the black and white stripes on her legs and the white “ax mark” on her thorax disappear.

“Where did you find her?” I asked.

“El Monte,” Marc said sadly. “A woman complained about being bitten during the day by mosquitoes, and I caught this one at her home.”

It was September 2, 2011. We thought Aedes albopictus had been eradicated from Los Angeles for 10 years, but these nasty vectors were back—and we were about to learn a hard lesson about the difficulty of controlling them. These days, controlling mosquitoes in North America is part of a larger Faustian bargain: We are free to travel and shop around the world, but without geographic barriers, exotic pests and viruses invade our shores. How can we be vigilant about these risks, without losing our minds about every foreign-sounding bug and virus?

Aedes albopictus (“albos” for short) is a mosquito that keeps vector control officers up at night, especially with the attention mosquito-borne Zika virus is garnering as it moves through Brazil, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Mosquitoes of the genus Aedes, including “albos,” are the ones in the U.S. capable of transmitting chikungunya, dengue, and Zika virus, all of which cause serious human diseases.

Worse, these black-striped mosquitoes are not shy about their love for humans: They prefer feeding on us and bite relentlessly during the day, enhancing the risk that they will spread viruses like Zika from the infected to the uninfected.

Finally, “albos” are difficult to control because they need only the tiniest amount of water—as little as a bottle cap full or a space between the leaf and stem of a plant—and their eggs survive a drought for a year or more.

California has been organizing programs to control mosquitoes for about 110 years, since 1909. Early programs fought malaria and in the 1940s and ’50s, the state formed many mosquito abatement districts when Western equine encephalomyelitis and St. Louis encephalitis viruses sickened hundreds of people and killed thousands of horses in the Central Valley. Since 2004, vector control agencies have waged a continuous battle against West Nile virus.

In 2001, Aedes albopictus, the “Asian tiger mosquito” arrived in California as a stowaway that arrived in shipments of popular plants marketed as “lucky bamboo.” The shipments were mostly from southern China; stalks of the plants were placed in tubs of water and sent off by the container load. Their voyage across the Pacific was the perfect pleasure cruise for an invading insect. Before shipping, the containers sat open on the docks, and mosquitoes laid eggs in the tubs. The crossing allowed these eggs to hatch, and adult mosquitoes that were trapped when container doors were shut laid more eggs. When the containers were opened upon arrival, adult mosquitoes escaped, and the eggs were transported to “lucky bamboo” distribution centers.

Getting rid of that infestation took a massive effort by multiple agencies—the University of California, the state’s Department of Public Health, and members of California’s Mosquito and Vector Control Association were all involved. Regulations were enacted to ensure “lucky bamboo” was no longer shipped in standing water. For the next three years, no one found Aedes albopictus. We Californians were proud of being the first state to eradicate a large infestation these mosquitoes.

We surmised that southern California’s climate was too inhospitable for Aedes albopictus to easily gain a foothold, and the pressure we exerted on them caused their demise.

We were very wrong.

The genetics of the mosquitoes we collected in 2011 most closely resembled those from south China, where the infestation in 2001 originated. Somehow, Aedes albopictus had lived under the radar here in Southern California for a decade. Surveillance to detect small populations of these mosquitoes is difficult, so by the time we found them in 2011, they had infested a large area.

Because of our relative success in 2001, we started fighting 2011’s infestation brimming with confidence. Along with our colleagues from the Greater Los Angeles County Vector Control District, we worked in a furious effort to determine the outer limit of the infestation, remove sources of water, educate residents, and eradicate any mosquitoes that we found. Initially, our hopes were buoyed when the mosquitoes seemed to disappear as the days shortened and the weather cooled in November 2011. We looked forward to wiping out a few remaining pockets in the spring of 2012.

Famous last words. When spring came, “albos” emerged with a vengeance. Although we tried everything, Aedes albopictus doubled its range every year after that. We expect to find them in each of the 24 cities in our jurisdiction by the end of 2016. The drought that continues to plague southern California will have little effect on Aedes albopictus; they hardly need any water to develop, and even without water, their eggs will remain poised for months, waiting for the next rain to fall.

Towards the end of 2014, the fight against Aedes albopictus in Los Angeles County took an ominous turn when Aedes aegypti was discovered in the City of Commerce. Now, two of the world’s most infamous vectors were present in the county. Aedes aegypti’s common name, the “yellow fever mosquito” says it all. Its biology is similar to Aedes albopictus, but Aedes aegypti is considered the most versatile vector of all when it comes to transmitting human diseases.

To make matters worse, Aedes aegypti had also been found in several counties in the Central Valley, and in San Mateo County. 2015 was a banner year for both species of Aedes. By its end, Aedes aegypti or albopictus could be found in 12 counties and 76 cities in California. The possibility that chikungunya, dengue, and Zika viruses could be transmitted locally became reality for a good portion of the state. Of course, while there still are just pockets of these mosquitoes in California and other parts of the southwest, Aedes mosquitoes have made themselves quite at home in the southeastern U.S., with a range that goes out as far north as Connecticut and the Midwest, and much of Texas.

Still, it’s not likely that a widespread epidemic like Zika in the Caribbean, Central, and South America will occur in the U.S. The viruses are not transmitted when Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus stop biting during winter, and the viruses cannot live in hosts other than humans. This means chikungunya, dengue, and Zika viruses must be introduced to mosquitoes each year by infected humans.

Even though the Zika virus, which is associated with severe brain damage in babies born to infected mothers, is getting all of the attention, the mosquito-borne virus that we should really worry about is the deadly West Nile virus. Unlike Zika, West Nile virus lives primarily in birds and is continuously present, ready to infect humans. Last year there were 299 cases in Los Angeles County and 22 deaths. These numbers are high—especially for a disease that doesn’t get much press anymore—but there may really have been as many as 7,000 cases of West Nile in Los Angeles alone last year, based on statistics from 2015 and the CDC’s estimates of symptomatic illness. What will happen with West Nile virus in 2016 is not certain, but the prospect of dealing with an epidemic caused by that virus along with local outbreaks of chikungunya, dengue, or Zika greatly concerns all of us at vector control agencies.

Our biggest challenge will be getting Californians to change their behavior. No agency’s budget is sufficiently large to hire enough workers to get into everyone’s backyard. We must motivate residents to remove all the sources of water on their property that may produce mosquitoes.

This time, we might just get lucky. Californians are not used to mosquitoes, and the ferocious daytime bites of Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus will interrupt our famous outdoor lifestyle—making people uncomfortable enough to take action. In a state with a vector control system designed to protect public health, it’s ironic that the mosquitoes themselves, not the diseases they transmit, may deliver a more powerful message than any public information campaign.

The post We Can’t Expect the Government to Save Us From Disease-Carrying Mosquitoes appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.