This morning, I heard part of an interview with a scientist on Living on Earth. He is transferring a human gene plus scorpion DNA to a fungus to mosquitos to kill malaria microbes. He was coolly matter-of-fact about how safe this is because it is so well-targeted.
I think it is insane to release such genetic modifications into the wild. This man may be the greatest scientist who ever lived. He may know everything there is to know about genetic modification (I do NOT believe that). But evolution is relentless and he can’t possibly foresee what happens generations down the road – a very short time for microbes and mosquitos. We surely still have much to learn about genetics and evolution. Those lessons should not come from an unrecoverable disaster.
Kudos to Living on Earth for the interview and for posting the recording and the transcript for free. Another service of public media.
Living on Earth: Curing Mosquitoes of Malaria
GELLERMAN: As I understand it, you’re using a genetically modified fungus to kill the malaria parasite. Which fungus, and how does it work?
ST. LEGER: Yes, we are. It’s a fungus called Metarhizium anisopliae, and it infects insects through their skin. And, what we’ve done is we’ve taken a gene encoding a human antibody, and we also tried a gene encoding an anti-malarial toxin, and we put those genes inside the fungus. And so now we’ve got a fungus that acts like a contact insecticide.
It lands on the insect’s skin, penetrates into the blood of the insect, and then will produce human antibody against the malaria, and basically cure the mosquito of malaria within a couple of days of infection.
GELLRMAN: But you didn’t want to kill the mosquito, you want to kill the parasite that carries the malaria. Why wouldn’t you want to kill the mosquito?
ST. LEGER: Well, we can kill the mosquito. We can engineer the fungus to express insecticidal toxins from a spider, and they’ll kill a mosquito in a couple of days. But the problem we might have then is, the likelihood is that the insects will evolve resistance to the fungus as well. So we wanted to change the strategy: target the malaria inside the mosquito.
GELLERMAN: Now you’re genetically modifying the fungus with a scorpion toxin. How’d you come up with that?
ST. LEGER: Ah, well, that’s scorpine as it’s called – it’s a toxin which has been studied for a few years now by different groups. And, it’s quite interesting – it’s an antimicrobial toxin, and it was shown to be effective against plasmodium a couple of years back. Now the scorpine toxin is from the Imperial Scorpion, a great big scorpion, a huge scorpion in fact, which has got a rather placid personality, plays well with children. …
GELLERMAN: And safe? I mean, you’ve got this genetically modified fungus… is it safe in the environment?
ST. LEGER: Well the wild-type fungus, the original fungus, is very safe. It’s been used for a long time, and it’s hard to see any tangible risk from what we’re doing.
Living on Earth: Curing Mosquitoes of Malaria
I’m puzzled by this text in particular. Mosquitos might evolve resistance to the fungus, so why wouldn’t malaria evolve in less time?
Even the destruction of life by mad scientists has a funny side: Conservatives fear the doom of debt. They’ll never see the flying scorpions until it’s too late.