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In this spring’s movie, a mutant spider created by DNA splicing bites the hero, giving him superhuman powers. Spider-Man never explains why scientists would tinker with a spider’s genes, but real-world geneticists are altering animal genes to fight real villains. They hope to create allies to fight against diseases and pests. The end of
Replica Omega May brought a vivid illustration of that promise and a surge of unease at the prospect of releasing genetically engineered animals into the wild.
Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena of Case Western Reserve University and his colleagues announced that they had crippled a mosquito’s ability to transmit malaria. Mosquitoes pick up the malaria parasite by sucking blood from an infected person. But this mosquito has an added gene for a substance that blocks the parasite’s movement out of the insects’ gut and into its saliva, keeping its next bite from being infectious.
The altered mosquito could be a powerful weapon against a disease that annually kills over a million people and has no vaccine or easy cure. But deploying it would mean releasing swarms of altered insects into the wild. And that would be an unprecedented step. Genetically modified crops already cover 90 million acres in the United States, but crops are far easier to contain than animals. “Frankly, a lot of the concerns about plants could pale in comparison to problems that could arise with animals,” says Jane Rissler of the Union of Concerned Scientists. What if the same change that kept a mosquito from spreading malaria ended up making it more efficient at spreading something else, critics ask.
“Definitely you need to address these concerns,” agrees Jacobs-Lorena. Extensive testing is one answer, and it has already begun for other altered animals. In 1996, two groups did field tests of genetically modified mites and worms. The creatures, which normally prey on pest insects, had been altered in a first step toward making them more effective against pests. Last October, scientists field-tested a cotton pest that carries a test gene Replica Omega Seamaster for a glowing jellyfish protein. Eventually they hope to create and release pest that would cause any wild ones they mated with to produce dud eggs, devastating the population.
It will probably take seven to 10 years of tests before any of these ideas are tried in the wild. The first genetically modified animal to leave the lab will probably not be the one designed to control a pest. Instead, environmentalists fear, it might accidentally become one.
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