For the sake of 600,000 children, science must be bold

Bold ideas in science research used to thrill us; now they seem pretty threatening.

- By LAURIE ZOLOTH

When I have written about the ethics of genetically engineered mosquitoes to combat malaria, many of my friends have expressed alarm. "What if it goes badly wrong?" they ask. What if there are unintended consequences that ripple across ecosystems? What if this is one of those technologies that cross the line from innovative to utterly world-destroying?

And yet, one could also ask, what if we do nothing? For that question, at least, we have an answer. A recent report from the World Health Organization reveals that 597,000 people died of malaria last year, overwhelmingly children under age five, and an estimated 263 million people were sickened. Thousands of families cradled a baby dying from a preventable fever; thousands of pregnancies ended in stillbirth or maternal death.

For a time in the early 2000s, it seemed as if the world was gaining ground against malaria, but progress has stalled, cases have risen and the hopes for its near-elimination by 2030 have been scuttled. Global warming, armed conflict and lack of funding are all factors. And while new vaccines certainly will help, they are limited in their effectiveness (they reduce the risk of severe malaria by 30 percent and require four separate clinic visits). For much of the world's poor, we still rely on the 19th-century technology of bed nets and insecticide.

For the past two decades, scientists have explored whether a new technology known as a gene drive might hold the tantalizing promise of eliminating malaria by targeting the mosquitoes that carry the deadly parasite. The reason the gene drive is so potentially revolutionary – but disturbing – is that it uses genetic engineering to introduce changes in mosquitoes that do not stop with one generation, but are preferentially inherited by all future generations.