Here’s the Plan to End Malaria With Crispr-Edited Mosquitoes

In 2003, scientists at London’s Imperial College hatched a somewhat out-there idea. They wanted to deal with the increasingly pesticide-resistant mosquitoes that were killing half a million people a year by spreading malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. What biologists Austin Burt and Andrea Crisanti proposed was nothing short of hacking the laws of heredity.; ; By planting a deadly gene in mosquito DNA, and engineering it such that the modification would spread through each generation faster than nature intended, they figured they could completely crash a population with just a few Trojan skeeters. This concept of a “gene drive” was decades-old, but no one had successfully concocted one in a lab, let alone applied it to a global public health scourge.