Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes With Disabled Wings Join Fight Against Dengue Fever
Dengue fever, a painful and potentially deadly virus that causes joint pain extreme enough to earn the nickname "bonecrusher disease", infects upwards of 100 million people every year. With no vaccine and no cure, there is little anyone can do to protect the 2.5 billion people currently at risk for infection. But University of California, Irvine professor Anthony James believes he can turn the very mosquitoes that spread the virus into the vector for prevention. James has genetically engineered a special breed of mosquito with a sex-linked gene causing malformed wings. The male mosquitoes that carry the gene fly fine, but female offspring of those males cannot get airborne. And since it's the females that spread dengue fever, James believes that releasing these genetically engineered males into the wild could result in proliferation of impotent female mosquitoes, and suppress the disease in under a year. Naturally, this plan presents some logistical...