In part 1 of this series, I discussed the history of genetic modification in insects as pest control. We’ve been creating insect GMOs for the purposes of controlling pests for awhile. If you bombard insects with radiation, it can kill rapidly reproducing cells. High doses of radiation can also damage the DNA in quickly reproducing gamete producing cells to the point where it can’t be read, creating severe mutations that stop important proteins from being made. In other words, sperm are produced, but they aren’t healthy. If female flies mate with one of these males, she won’t produce any offspring. If this happens enough on a large scale, the population plummets because females aren’t producing viable offspring.
This technique has been used for years in various disciplines from medicine to agriculture. There’s always room for improvement, and this is no exception.
Vector borne diseases (VBDs) are generally pretty bad. Yellow fever, the disease which stopped the Panama canal dead in it’s tracks, makes your liver fail and turns you yellow… hence the name. Malaria is caused by a parasite which ruptures blood cells in unison. African trypanosomiasis makes you go to sleep and then die. Dengue fever lays you up in bed for six months in some of the worst agony imaginable. Hell, even veterinary VBDs are horrifying… outbreaks of rift valley fever usually present with random farm animal abortions.
In 2008, malaria alone killed 708,000 to over a million people, most of them young children in sub-Saharan Africa, and an estimated 190 to 311 million cases of malaria occurred worldwide, according to the CDC. Diseases like malaria, may actually work to keep poor regions poor. Control methods often do not reach the poorest people due to high cost… vector borne diseases tend to be diseases of poverty.
Check out this video made as a public service announcement in 1943 by Disney. Some of the control methods have changed, such as specific chemicals, but not that much.
So… what can be done to help save lives in regions with VBD problems? We can vaccinate, in those few cases where vaccines have been developed, and we can kill the vectors, but vector control efforts can be expensive. Education and awareness is great, too… let the locals know what the potential harm is and send them on search and destroy missions to remove insect breeding grounds.
But… and this is the cool part… we’ve got a new tool in our arsenal.
Jorge Cham, the creator of the hilarious and successful online comic strip, Piled Higher and Deeper (Ph.D.), just visited NMSU’s Chili Pepper Institute, and took video! Check it out.
PHD Tales from the Road – NMSU’s Chile Pepper Institute from PHD Comics on Vimeo.
While I was at the 2010 BIO convention, I was running around capturing footage, talking to people about our site, and taking pictures of Frank’s escapades whenever I could. Somehow in the middle of all this, the Council for Biotechnology Information grabbed me for an interview.* While I am normally on the other side of the recording device, I thought I did pretty well. Here I am talking about the biggest misunderstanding about Genetically
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