> To address this challenge, Verily, an affiliate of Alphabet Inc, developed a mosquito rearing and sex sorting and release technology as part of its global Debug project.
Verily is formerly "Google Life Sciences" and currently Alphabet Inc's research arm for life sciences.
If only Australia's CSIRO still had enough funding to do this kind of work itself rather than 'partner with' (i.e. contribute public funding towards the private investment goals of) for-profit companies.
Amongst CSIRO's earlier inventions are 1960s insect repelent 'Aerogard', polymer banknotes and major components of Wi-Fi as we know it.
> Aedes, Anopheles and Culex are found almost all over the world and are responsible for around 17 per cent of infectious disease transmissions globally."
If I understand that correctly, that is a massive number. I really like what these sterilization trials are producing. In my mind, it’s a lot safer than spraying chemicals across cities.
It gets worse. As I posted elsewhere in the comments, an article in Nature[1] suggests that up to half of humans ever to live have died as a result of mosquito-borne disease.
In light of those numbers I feel we are ethically clear to take drastic action. We don't have to kill all mosquitoes as fewer than 1% of mosquito species feed on humans. We have several tools which will target the specific species which impact us (such as the approach used in this article). It's time we do something about it, or accept the fact that millions more humans are going to die while we wring our hands.
What are the negative outcomes? Presumably we leave a niche for other mosquito or insect species to prosper in, which species will they be. Which species predate the mosquitoes we're eliminating, or how do those particular species adapt the environment and so impact the local eco-system?
If we've not found any negatives then I imagine we've not tried very hard.
Australia is kinda synonymous with species-wide population control and not in a good way; hopefully this will change that?
That list suggests that the technique is an effective way of holding an insect population down in general, but not a good way of eliminating it entirely. Furthermore, the trials involving Aedes, Anopheles, and Culex are particularly unpromising:
> Culex quinquefasciatus / Myanmar / 1967 -- population eliminated
> Culex quinquefasciatus / Florida / 1969 -- population eliminated
> Culex pipiens / France / 1970 -- population "reduced"
> Anopheles albimanus / El Salvador / 1972 -- population reduced "below detection level"
> Culex quinquefasciatus / Delhi / 1973 -- population "reduced"
> Aedes aegypti / Kenya / 1974 -- no long-term effect
> Anopheles albimanus / El Salvador / 1977-1979 -- significant reduction, but eradication prevented by immigration
> Culex tarsalis / California / 1981 -- "no population reduction"
So, in 9 trials the first 5 were whole or partial successes and the last 4 failed. (I have no idea what the story is with the two ~simultaneous trials in Delhi.) That's not great and the trend is ugly.
I tend to suspect the reason mosquitoes show up in this list with so many failures is precisely the fact that people hate them and significant efforts have already been devoted to their extermination. This strategy can't work over the long term -- either the population is wiped out quickly or not at all.
It is theorized there is no adverse effect from killing mosquito species. There is always a counter-effect. Typically it's unpredictable. Mosquitoes FACILITATE transmission of bad stuff. I believe that if bad stuff is not transmitted, species evolve more slowly against pathogens. Species will still be exposed, maybe generations later through a scratch or otherwise. At that point, having never evolved a strong immune system the same animals will be less prepared. It's not whether the American Indians were to die from European diseases, but when.
"The "Four Pests" campaign was introduced in 1958 by Mao Zedong, as a hygiene campaign aimed to eradicate the pests responsible for the transmission of pestilence and disease: the mosquitos responsible for malaria; the rodents that spread the plague; the pervasive airborne flies; and the sparrows – specifically the Eurasian tree sparrow – which ate grain seed and fruit.[1]
[...]
By April 1960, Chinese leaders changed their opinion due to the influence of ornithologist Tso-hsin Cheng[2] who pointed out that sparrows ate a large number of insects, as well as grains.[8][9] Rather than being increased, rice yields after the campaign were substantially decreased.[10][9] Mao ordered the end of the campaign against sparrows, replacing them with bed bugs, as the extermination of the former upset the ecological balance, and bugs destroyed crops as a result of the absence of natural predators. By this time, however, it was too late. With no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the country and compounding the ecological problems already caused by the Great Leap Forward, including widespread deforestation and misuse of poisons and pesticides.[10] Ecological imbalance is credited with exacerbating the Great Chinese Famine, in which 20–45 million people died of starvation.[11][12][Emphasis added]"
Its important to differentiate b/w the plans of a politician and the plans of research scientists who have done actual work in this area. Mao's plans seem to have been a hare-brained solution to China's problems (and they're not the only one. Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward cost more lives than both the world wars... and they were all Chinese lives).
We can thank the Chinese for their bold experiments in recent history to give us some significant real-world examples to back up our cautions about the risks of ecosystem engineering.
I think we should get into ecosystem engineering (it will be a tech, like anything else, capable of good or bad), but it's too powerful now and our knowledge / control is too limited. Thanks Mao.
There are always complex consequences, but note that Aedes aegypti is human-introduced in Australia to start with. It's an intrusive species, it may be safe to eradicate.
Yep, same in Fresno. Honestly in most places, they're only able to survive because of humans and people who over water their lawn specifically. The climate in these places are generically not made for that specie. It's also worth noting that there are many other types of musquito around so they're not wiping out all musquito, just that one specie which consist of a small fraction of all musquitos
Couldn't the same be said for any form of medicine or protection that helps people survive? Should we remove all of it so that more people die, to hasten evolution?
I remember this was the big debate several years ago when the idea was first promoted. However, Google and some non-profits appear to be moving ahead with the blessing of local governments. I'm assuming that with the relatively short lifespan of mosquitos and birds, we'll be able to see if there's an unintended chain reaction in these local ecosystems in a few years time.
It's because the specific specie they target isn't even native to that place (it was introduced by humans), and also represent a small fraction of all musquitos in the area.
Agreed. Ecosystems are a delicate balance. Who knows what chaos will be unleashed by tampering with them? Especially species facilitating horizontal gene transfer. Pathogen vector may be only one of the functions of the mosquito. Perhaps by simply existing and occupying so much of a certain pathway they are keeping other pathogens at bay or preventing other viruses from evolving, perhaps down paths that, after the pressure of not having mosquito as a carrier, selects for more powerful pathogens that can thrive without mosquitoes. Sometimes having a tolerable evil we know is better than one we don't. Perhaps what we are really doing with ending mosquitoes is putting selective pressure on the pathogens formerly carried by them to find innovative, and possibly worse-for-us, ways to evolve and spread.
> Who knows what chaos will be unleashed by tampering with them?
It's a good question. And the same thing could be said about any disease prevention strategy. What if the persistent presence of Polio is necessary for us to survive some future hypothesised outbreak? Imagination is the limit here.
But we certainly do know the chaos that is unleashed everyday by not eradicating viruses that use mosquitoes as a vector.
Humans have already unwittingly destroyed most of the ecosystems in the world, so I'm not really opposed to teams of scientists carefully making such changes in the future.
Evolution requires deaths, so the cost is millions of people dying! Until we understand better the cost, I think it's reasonable to put it on hold as much as possible
IIRC this is an Australian initiative: the basic work on the application of Walbachia to dengue, the formation of the world mosquito program, it's an initiative grounded in Australian science.
yes, you will find "we did it" in China and Brazil and Vietnam and other places: The roots of this work go back to 2011 and before, at Monash University:
Yes. this story is. It would not surprise me if there are co-collaborators in CSIRO who came from the Monash programme, or if the WMP has funded this (which is run from Monash).
Verily brought mechanistic sex-sorting of mozzies. The CSIRO has a remit to get IPR into play, its government science for profit (I used to work at the CSIRO btw) and James Cook is right in the heart of the Australian mosquito belt. Maybe Monash is in a different sphere now.
No matter: the groundwork on Walbachia, the fundamentals stem from what they did. The cited 'happened here before' moments in this thread? most of them are WMP initiatives.
How long did they measure this for, and how long is that relative to the lifecycle / reproductive cycle of a mosquito? Is there any reason to believe the mosquito population won't quickly (or if not quickly, then eventually) bounce back?
Assuming they are like some flies that has been eradicated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique , the population would bounce back in a few years. You must repeat the treatment next year lower the population to the 5% of the initial population, and repeat the treatment the next year to reduce it to the 1% and repeat it a few years to reduce each time the population until it is completely eradicated. And then a few times to be sure.
And later implement some kind of check to avoid the reintroduction. Some countries that have a nice natural barrier have checks to avoid the introduction of fruit that may have flies larva. With mosquito, I'm not sure how the larva can travel from one country to another...
The guaranteed human and economic benefits of wiping out mosquitoes, far outweigh any theoretical downside.
I like how you just state that, like it doesn't even matter what the downside was. What if bird populations crashed and a pestilence set upon crops worldwide, and caused mass starvation & millions dead- kind of exactly like what happened during the Great Leap Forward?
I'm not saying that would happen, but we can't just say "lots of people die of malaria, so don't even worry about the downside"
There are literally thousands of species of mosquito which don’t bite humans. Just one sub-species which kills hundreds of thousands of human babies is being targeted.
It’s great to ask “what-if”?! This is a well studied problem of an invasive species where the scientific answer to your question is: there is no downside.
>What if bird populations crashed and a pestilence set upon crops worldwide, and caused mass starvation & millions dead- kind of exactly like what happened during the Great Leap Forward?
Do you have any evidence at all that such a thing is likely to happen? What level of certainty that such an outcome won't happen are you aiming for? Others have noted that scientists have considered the effects of eradicating disease causing mosquitoes, and concluded that eradicating them won't to the best of our knowledge cause ecological problems. I showed evidence that around half a million people are dying every year from mosquito borne diseases. When 500,000 people are dying a year, you need more than just a vague feeling of unease not to support eradicating disease causing mosquitoes.
> The guaranteed human and economic benefits of wiping out mosquitoes, far outweigh any theoretical downside.
I don’t see how you can be so certain. We know that time and time again, the human race has thought this to be the case and ended up with serious resulting issues.
That’s not to say that the potential issues would be worse than 500k people per year, but I don’t see how we can say that with any real certainty.
I am all for wiping out Malaria, but wouldn't it be prudent to try and develop what-if scenarios and test them to see if there is an adverse ecological impact?
I would also be curious to know the business / funding arrangement details to see if there is any possible conflict of interest. No one will look for adverse impacts if the profit motive is persuasive enough not to look very hard.
It's not inherently prudent to wait and do more analysis; proceeding too quickly is dangerous since it may do harm, but proceeding too slowly is dangerous since people are dying right now and needlessly postponing a solution means needlessly murdering many people. There's a tradeoff of "carefulness" where beyond a certain level waiting to do extra analysis is harmful. For this particular species of mosquitoes we currently have a good reason to believe that we are beyond this point, we have enough information about the risks so that it's prudent to go ahead and, well, save lives.
Readit News
Verily is formerly "Google Life Sciences" and currently Alphabet Inc's research arm for life sciences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verily_Life_Sciences
Amongst CSIRO's earlier inventions are 1960s insect repelent 'Aerogard', polymer banknotes and major components of Wi-Fi as we know it.
If CSIRO doesn't partner with industry you end up with debacles like the wifi lawsuit.
Is this actually happening, or is this just speculation?
Deleted Comment
https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/18/heres-the-real-buzz-g...
https://blog.verily.com/2017/07/debug-fresno-our-first-us-fi...
Wonder why Australia had 12% better results? The sheer size of the experiment there? Australia was much bigger than Fresno, with only 300 acres there.
If I understand that correctly, that is a massive number. I really like what these sterilization trials are producing. In my mind, it’s a lot safer than spraying chemicals across cities.
In light of those numbers I feel we are ethically clear to take drastic action. We don't have to kill all mosquitoes as fewer than 1% of mosquito species feed on humans. We have several tools which will target the specific species which impact us (such as the approach used in this article). It's time we do something about it, or accept the fact that millions more humans are going to die while we wring our hands.
[1] https://www.nature.com/news/2002/021003/full/news021001-6.ht...
If we've not found any negatives then I imagine we've not tried very hard.
Australia is kinda synonymous with species-wide population control and not in a good way; hopefully this will change that?
That list suggests that the technique is an effective way of holding an insect population down in general, but not a good way of eliminating it entirely. Furthermore, the trials involving Aedes, Anopheles, and Culex are particularly unpromising:
> Culex quinquefasciatus / Myanmar / 1967 -- population eliminated
> Culex quinquefasciatus / Florida / 1969 -- population eliminated
> Culex pipiens / France / 1970 -- population "reduced"
> Anopheles albimanus / El Salvador / 1972 -- population reduced "below detection level"
> Culex quinquefasciatus / Delhi / 1973 -- population "reduced"
> Culex quinquefasciatus / Delhi / 1973 (?) -- population unaffected
> Aedes aegypti / Kenya / 1974 -- no long-term effect
> Anopheles albimanus / El Salvador / 1977-1979 -- significant reduction, but eradication prevented by immigration
> Culex tarsalis / California / 1981 -- "no population reduction"
So, in 9 trials the first 5 were whole or partial successes and the last 4 failed. (I have no idea what the story is with the two ~simultaneous trials in Delhi.) That's not great and the trend is ugly.
I tend to suspect the reason mosquitoes show up in this list with so many failures is precisely the fact that people hate them and significant efforts have already been devoted to their extermination. This strategy can't work over the long term -- either the population is wiped out quickly or not at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign
"The "Four Pests" campaign was introduced in 1958 by Mao Zedong, as a hygiene campaign aimed to eradicate the pests responsible for the transmission of pestilence and disease: the mosquitos responsible for malaria; the rodents that spread the plague; the pervasive airborne flies; and the sparrows – specifically the Eurasian tree sparrow – which ate grain seed and fruit.[1]
[...]
By April 1960, Chinese leaders changed their opinion due to the influence of ornithologist Tso-hsin Cheng[2] who pointed out that sparrows ate a large number of insects, as well as grains.[8][9] Rather than being increased, rice yields after the campaign were substantially decreased.[10][9] Mao ordered the end of the campaign against sparrows, replacing them with bed bugs, as the extermination of the former upset the ecological balance, and bugs destroyed crops as a result of the absence of natural predators. By this time, however, it was too late. With no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the country and compounding the ecological problems already caused by the Great Leap Forward, including widespread deforestation and misuse of poisons and pesticides.[10] Ecological imbalance is credited with exacerbating the Great Chinese Famine, in which 20–45 million people died of starvation.[11][12][Emphasis added]"
I think we should get into ecosystem engineering (it will be a tech, like anything else, capable of good or bad), but it's too powerful now and our knowledge / control is too limited. Thanks Mao.
It's a good question. And the same thing could be said about any disease prevention strategy. What if the persistent presence of Polio is necessary for us to survive some future hypothesised outbreak? Imagination is the limit here.
But we certainly do know the chaos that is unleashed everyday by not eradicating viruses that use mosquitoes as a vector.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=930498...
yes, you will find "we did it" in China and Brazil and Vietnam and other places: The roots of this work go back to 2011 and before, at Monash University:
https://www.monash.edu/industry/success-stories/dengue
http://www.eliminatedengue.com/about-us
Verily brought mechanistic sex-sorting of mozzies. The CSIRO has a remit to get IPR into play, its government science for profit (I used to work at the CSIRO btw) and James Cook is right in the heart of the Australian mosquito belt. Maybe Monash is in a different sphere now.
No matter: the groundwork on Walbachia, the fundamentals stem from what they did. The cited 'happened here before' moments in this thread? most of them are WMP initiatives.
And later implement some kind of check to avoid the reintroduction. Some countries that have a nice natural barrier have checks to avoid the introduction of fruit that may have flies larva. With mosquito, I'm not sure how the larva can travel from one country to another...
* Malaria killed 445,000 people in 2016.
* Of those, 285,000 were children under the age of 5.
* There were 216 million cases of malaria in 2016.
That is a large city's worth of children dying every year, and a large country's population having severely reduced productivity.
And that is just one mosquito born illness.
The guaranteed human and economic benefits of wiping out mosquitoes, far outweigh any theoretical downside.
This group and other groups working to wipe out mosquitoes are truly doing humanity a great service.
I like how you just state that, like it doesn't even matter what the downside was. What if bird populations crashed and a pestilence set upon crops worldwide, and caused mass starvation & millions dead- kind of exactly like what happened during the Great Leap Forward?
I'm not saying that would happen, but we can't just say "lots of people die of malaria, so don't even worry about the downside"
It’s great to ask “what-if”?! This is a well studied problem of an invasive species where the scientific answer to your question is: there is no downside.
Do you have any evidence at all that such a thing is likely to happen? What level of certainty that such an outcome won't happen are you aiming for? Others have noted that scientists have considered the effects of eradicating disease causing mosquitoes, and concluded that eradicating them won't to the best of our knowledge cause ecological problems. I showed evidence that around half a million people are dying every year from mosquito borne diseases. When 500,000 people are dying a year, you need more than just a vague feeling of unease not to support eradicating disease causing mosquitoes.
We could probably fix that without need for any new technology and with only minimal changes to the eco-system. I wonder which costs more.
[Yes, I know it doesn't work like that and that these are not mutually exclusive.]
I don’t see how you can be so certain. We know that time and time again, the human race has thought this to be the case and ended up with serious resulting issues.
That’s not to say that the potential issues would be worse than 500k people per year, but I don’t see how we can say that with any real certainty.
I would also be curious to know the business / funding arrangement details to see if there is any possible conflict of interest. No one will look for adverse impacts if the profit motive is persuasive enough not to look very hard.
https://qz.com/640394/a-chinese-mosquito-factory-releases-20...
But looks like we're not there yet.
1. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/31/17344406/cr...