This tiny insect has just feasted on human blood and one bite from it can infect you with malaria, the disease that kills 650,000 people every year. So why are British scientists playing God by breeding genetically modified mosquitoes? And are we prepared for the consequences?It’s the middle of the day and the genetically modified mosquitoes are feeding.
The females of the species are ingesting what is known in mosquito parlance as their ‘blood meal’.
The tiny-winged insects cluster in their thousands on the small plastic dispensers of sugar solution, or hang upside down from a thin layer of transparent plastic attached to the top of their cage.
The plastic is designed to simulate human or animal skin, and trapped behind it is a film of horse blood.
There are hundreds of thousands of the insects in the small white plastic cages on the laboratory shelves in a south Oxfordshire industrial park.
The air in the laboratory is warm and there’s a smell of chemicals.
In plastic and glass containers thousands more mosquitoes are hatching in water that has a yellowish tint to it: they swarm together and move with the light every time a hand is passed over the surface of the container.
On strips of brown paper curled around inside plastic beakers and Tupperware-like boxes, there are hundreds of thousands of minuscule black dots stuck together: these are mosquito eggs.
‘This is our mosquito factory,’ says Hadyn Parry. ‘Here we practise birth control for mosquitoes.’
Parry is chief executive officer of Oxitec, a British bio-research company that pioneers innovative methods of controlling insects that damage crops and spread diseases.
Standing with Parry is zoologist Dr Luke Alphey. They are working on a new method of fighting one of the deadliest killers mankind has ever known: malaria. Read More
