The Mutant Swarm Unleashed

Trey Smith

In many parts of the country, summer picnickers often must entertain two unwanted guests: ants and mosquitoes. The ants go after the food in the picnic basket, while the mosquitoes go after a different sort of food -- you!

Mosquitoes are a problem on my hill in South Bend for much of the months of July and August. There is a prime breeding spot in the forested ravine below in the form of Mill Pond. The swarm comes up the hill and, despite my town's poisonous counterattack, they persist on our hill until the rains return in early to mid September.

If a certain biotech company has its way, one day we may wake to find that our mosquitoes have changed from their usual selves into a mutant swarm! The British Biotech firm, Oxitec, is working on a plan to release "genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes in an effort to combat dengue fever," both in Brazil and the State of Florida.

The ostensible rationale behind this plan is that the GM mosquitoes have been rendered sterile, so they won't reproduce and this lack of reproduction will tamp down on the overall population. Unfortunately, it turns out that this claim is not altogether true! According to several environmental groups,

A confidential internal document obtained by civil society groups shows genetically modified mosquitoes described by their manufacturer, UK company Oxitec, as “sterile” are in fact not sterile and their offspring have a 15 percent survival rate in the presence of the common antibiotic tetracycline.

Is this what we really need? Mutant mosquitoes that are harder to kill? In time, the non-sterile mosquitoes might pickup these genes to create a new flying monster that can withstand all our efforts to control it.

I look at it this way. According to the theory of evolution, species make modifications in their biology slowly over the course of time. They keep attributes that prove beneficial and discard those that limit their ability to survive and flourish. In other words, evolution is a process looking at the long-term viability of each species.

The process of genetic modification is focused on short-term concerns. It doesn't look at the big picture. We attack or address a particular concern -- like dengue fever in mosquitoes or pesticide resistance in corn -- without understanding the overall long-term ramifications of our actions. While we may certainly solve a narrow problem today, we have no way of knowing if we are creating future problems.

What we basically are doing is mucking up nature! Nature has been humming along for millions (if not billions) of years and it has been doing just fine, thank you. Why is it that we now think we have the wisdom to take over the job?

I would think that fundamentalist Christians would have a problem with genetic modification. From their perspective, humankind is trying to play God. The creator made things a particular way and here we sinful people are trying to tinker with his divine blueprint!