Frankenstein in the Florida Keys

Mosquitoes are a true summer joy, as anyone who has tried to sleep near a river, a tributary or even a gutter like the Manzanares, Madrid's fluvial heart, to the blush of its inhabitants, knows.

But if they were just annoying we could find ourselves with a song in the teeth.

It is that on top of that they transmit yellow fever, dengue, zika and chikungunya, to name a few of his masterpieces.

A single species,

or white-legged mosquito, as it is called in Venezuela, transmits all these diseases with extreme ease, causing death and hardship in the tropical regions of Africa, America and Asia.

Another mosquito,

, is the main vector of malaria, a disease that kills half a million people every year, most of them children.

What to do against these diseases, then?

Correct: kill mosquitoes.

The vector is dead, malaria is dead.

Ok, and how do you do that?

Insecticides, repellant lotions, and curtained beds offer some local protection, but they do nothing to reduce the regional population of mosquitoes, which will continue to do their damned job for ever and ever.

On the other hand, we do not want to exterminate the 3,500 existing species of mosquitoes, but only those that efficiently transmit the most dangerous diseases.

When you have to be lethal and specific, the best solution is genetics.

And so scientists thought a few years ago.

The idea is to genetically modify the males so that, when they interbreed with wild females, the father's artificial genes kill his daughters.

It is the females that bite humans, so if there are few females, there is little transmission of disease.

The male offspring, however, survive and continue to pass on their lethal genes generation after generation.

It is a highly precise genetic bomb: it only affects one species of mosquito, and only the females of that species.

The day a missile does that is still a long, long way off.

Generating genetically modified animals is the daily routine of biological laboratories.

The novelty here is that the experiment must be released in the field to see if it works.

After some very limited trials, the system has been tested for the first time on US soil.

The release of modified mosquitoes began in April 2021 in the Florida Keys, a chain of islands in the southeastern United States, and the results have just been revealed in a webinar by Oxitec, the British company that built the transgenic mosquitoes.

Five million modified male

have been released into the keys in seven months.

And the system works as expected.

All the females that carry the modified gene have died before they can bite anyone.

Good shot.

What can be done gets done, scientists say.

Cloning, stem cell cultures and genome editing could be done and have ended up being done, although sometimes after a stint in jail.

Releasing transgenic mosquitoes in the countryside horrifies environmentalists and pisses off bioethicists, but it could be done, has been done, and has shown its usefulness.

My opinion?

Get on with it.

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