Ben Greenfield on science: what the evidence says · JRE #1069
“I read a study this morning of gene editing mosquitoes now, like they're using CRISPR technology to make the mosquitoes less likely to bite you.”
What the evidence says
CRISPR-based mosquito research is real and has produced published results, but the leading peer-reviewed studies in this space do not target biting frequency directly. The most prominent CRISPR-mosquito result, published in Nature Biotechnology in 2018, used a CRISPR-Cas9 gene drive targeting the doublesex gene in Anopheles gambiae (the African malaria vector): females carrying the edited allele developed an intersex phenotype and became completely sterile, and the edit spread through caged populations until the population collapsed within seven to eleven generations. That mechanism suppresses mosquito populations and, by extension, disease transmission; it does not alter individual mosquitoes' propensity to bite humans. As described, Greenfield's summary conflates population-suppression and sterility research with a claim about reduced biting behavior, which the underlying CRISPR mosquito literature does not directly support.