GM mosquito immune to malaria

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6468381.stm

At first sight, it seems to be the first evah non-evil use of GM, BUT

We need to be able to recognise "safe" GM mosquitoes from dangerous regular mosquitoes. What was their bright idea? GM mosquitoes have glowing eyes! Mwah ha ha!

Fire Mosquitos?

There are plenty benevolent uses for GM.

The Goa'uld have all the tricks to invade our poor planet... *switches all P-90 for flyswatters in the SG teams*

edited 24th Oct '11 2:38:16 PM by RufusShinra

That article is from 2007 by the way.

I just saw it on Channel 4, Googled it and that was the link provided. If you have a more recent link, please post it.

A more recent BBC article I think.

Nice. Now if you could just make them not itch that'd remove about 90% of everything that is bad about mosquitoes.

GM crops feed half the planet. Get over this stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid (that is seven times stupid) fixation that genetic engineering is somehow For the Evulz - it makes you sound like an ignoramus at best, and racist at worst (Yes, I am playing the race card here. Saying that drought resistant rice is evil is the same thing as saying you think that most of India and China deserve to starve to death).

Monsanto rice gives an abundant crop and dies, Peasant have to buy new seed year by year. GM is 'genericly' evil.

GM mosquito seems to be non-evil, but it has glowing eyes. Mwah ha ha.

Oh for heaven's sake. While I agree that drought-resistant rice (and corotin-enriched rice, too) are a good thing, GM is not an easy free ticket to solving the world's problems. There are legitimate reasons to fear GM crops beyond "GM is unnatural! It's eeeevil!".

They have the potential to seriously muck up ecosystems if they're not managed responsibly. What do I see lining the roads while driving in rural Queensland? Canola. Canola everywhere. Even when there hasn't been a canola field for kilometres. There's a possibility that in engineering our crops we are creating super-weeds.

edited 24th Oct '11 4:47:51 PM by LoniJay

Again, that is an impossibility. GM crops are purposefully designed to not be viable outside of farming. For starters, the seeds are sterile, and all GM crops are grown from clones or factory-produced seeds, where the seeds are artificially inseminated. There are actually laws in place that says anything that could potentially get introduced into the wild has to be sterile. So the argument that they will "take over the ecosystem" is a facile one. The canola that you are seeing is probably from an organic farm, not a GM farm.

Mutations happen. Not commonly, but they do happen. It has been known for vaccination strains of viruses (genetically engineered to be harmless) to revert to virulence again.

Precautions are good, yes, and I'm not saying that we should ban all GM crops because of this risk. I'm just saying, making out that there are NO legitimate reasons to be wary of GM crops or animals is unfair.

Stop strawmanning people as science-fearing racists, please.

It's a hell of a lot more than that. Nearly every crop you eat be it corn, rice, wheat, fruits, peppers, melons, whatever is Genetically Modified from its original species.

For example, the original species of corn still lives in the Andes mountains but you wouldn't recognize it if you were in a valley full of it. It's a short grass and the ears are barely fingertip sized.

Worst of all for GM haters, we did genetic modification of food for over ten thousand years. It's called domestication people. What Monsanto and others are doing is little different than what our ancestors were doing to rice, beans, corn and squash thousands of years ago turning them from small, often rare or hard to distinguish plants into massive crop yields you can grow in a desert.

I will be perfectly accepting of genetically modified food and livestock as soon as the FDA has been properly funded and restructured, and not a minute before.

^ I hope you don't plan on eating anything soon. GM food is 90% of the human diet one way or another and has been for ten thousand years.

Well, that doesn't mean I'm not going to eat anything. It means anybody who says "our food is perfectly safe" will be treated as ignorant until proven otherwise. The FDA is severely underfunded, understaffed, and has either too little power or the wrong powers to begin with, depending on the issue, and relying on corporations to regulate themselves is like relying on thieves to housesit for you while you go on vacation.

GM isn't the problem, loss of biodiversity is. We can have as much GM if we are sensible enough to create enough variety between strains and grow multiple crops in close proximity on the same land. Basic precautions again to prevent a strain from getting lucky.

Frankly, as widespread as GM is, there's no point to avoiding it now: by the time we figure out it might be bad, we'll have eaten too much. My only concern is the possibility of an arms race with mutating crop diseases, which could be all sorts of not cool. But hey, that's a risk that can't be eliminated. LEADING BACK TO OUR TOPIC! What are the odds that the malaria parasite will adapt to this?

Oh, and what joey said about food distribution.

But I like Malaria, I mean, in this time of limited resources and a swiftly growing overpopulation problem, is it really the best idea to eliminate diseases?

^ Yet strangely, I don't see you volunteering to contract it.

Anyway, regarding GM, surely it makes more sense to address the effects of specific modifications rather than to condemn a neutral scientific practice? I can't see anything "evil" about attempting to save lives.

edited 24th Oct '11 5:50:13 PM by BobbyG

Well I thought that was food production was on topic but i guess the mods have spoken.

Anyway if this mosquito can end malaria I'm all for it.

edited 25th Oct '11 12:49:57 PM by joeyjojo

How much malaria does kill anyway?

About a million or so a year apparently.

EDIT: Incorrect, it's around 781,000 per year according to the WHO out of 225 million cases.

edited 25th Oct '11 10:27:43 AM by rmctagg09

Hmm, I guess that wouldn't significantly cause population overgrow so go ahead and get rid of it even though I don't like extincting things.