Florida mosquitoes

A specimen of 'Aedes aegypti' under the light of a microscope at the Fiocruz institute in Recife (Brazil) .Felipe Dana / AP

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• Plan approved to release 750 million transgenic mosquitoes in the United States

It had to come sometime. Oxitec, a British biotech firm, has just released genetically engineered mosquitoes across the Florida Keys. Read like this, it looks like the work of the eternal wacky scientist from gothic novels and Hollywood movies. For some reason, genetic modification encourages a more visceral and automatic rejection in the public than the atomic bomb. If these Oxitec scientists are nuts, however, there is a method to their madness, as there was in Hamlet's. What is that method? And what would happen if it got out of hand, as it often happens in the movies?

The Florida Keys are an archipelago of 1,700 islets in the extreme southeastern United States.

Cayo is an Antillean term for an island resting on a coral reef.

Other islands were born as volcanoes, but the keys are the product of a peaceful, parsimonious process, more biological than geological.

Caribbean.

That natural paradise lives embittered by the famous

mosquito

, specialized in spreading a dreadful catalog of infectious agents, from dengue to yellow fever and from Zika to chikungunya.

Each of these diseases is due to a very different and difficult-to-treat pathogen, but they all travel in the same species of mosquitoes.

From there to the key idea there is only one aha!

Let's exterminate the

and we juggle four pests for the price of one.

Exterminate a species of mosquitoes, and only her, it is said soon, but there are not enough armies on the planet to achieve that feat. How to do it then? It's genetics, buddy. A high-precision tool that can be used to destroy one species without touching the others. The question is this. In this species of mosquitoes only females bite. If you modify a few males in the laboratory to put in a gene that is harmless for them but disastrous for them, the males will continue to spread their genetic trap for as many generations as it takes to deactivate the females. The idea works.

In recent years, Oxitec had already launched field studies in Brazil, Malaysia, Panama and the Cayman Islands, but this time it has had to face United States regulations, much more guaranteeing, and the approval process has taken ten years. But it's already underway, Emily Waltz reports for

. Last week, Oxitec researchers placed boxes of modified

eggs

at six locations in the keys. From now on, males equipped with their secret genetic poison will be born, at the rate of 12,000 males a week for the next 12 weeks. That gives 144,000 male exterminators, and the plan is to reach 20 million in a second phase within a few months.

The easy thing is the usual, accusing Oxitec scientists of arrogant, deranged and irresponsible, diabolical people playing God and all the repertoire of disqualifications that Mary Shelley already invented two centuries ago. The difficult thing is to reason about the advantages and disadvantages of the technique with a calm and informed spirit, and to bow the head until you understand the position of the other. It will not happen.