Mosquito engineering. Building a disease-fighting mosquito

Abstract

With resistance against insecticides on the rise and a U.N.-backed push to phase out DDT, several labs have embarked on the most ambitious and futuristic of all approaches to combat malaria: They hope to replace billions and billions of mosquitoes in the world's endemic areas with new strains, created in the lab, that would be "refractory," or unable to transmit Plasmodium, the parasite that causes the disease. The idea is not that farfetched, these researchers claim.