I. Introduction
A. What if, you could use genetic engineering to stop humanity’s most dangerous predator. The deadliest animal on the planet responsible for the death of billions, the mighty mosquito.
B. A new technology could help us eliminate malaria forever and possibly many others viruses to, but to do so we need to engineer a whole animal population
C. Along with many other diseases that mosquitoes play host to. Malaria is one of the cruelest parasites on earth, and possibly the single biggest killer of humans in history. In 2015 alone, hundreds of millions were infected and almost half a million people died.
D. If any of you don’t know malaria is caused by a group of microorganisms: Plasmodia, very weird microorganisms that consist of just a single-cell, they’re parasites that completely rely on mosquitoes.
II. Main Body
A. Malaria always starts with an insect bite.
1. In its salivary glands, thousands of sporozoites wait until the insect penetrates your skin, immediately after invading you they head for the liver, where they quietly enter big cells and hide from the immune system.
2. For up to a month they stay there in stealth mode consuming the cells alive and changing into their next form and they multiply
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The edits would only be inherited by half the offspring because most genes have two versions inside the genome as a fail-safe. So after just two generations, at most only half of the offspring would carry the engineered gene. In a population of billions of mosquitoes they would hardly make a difference. A genetic engineering method called the gene drive solves this problem. It forces the new gene to become dominant in the following generations overpowering the old gene almost completely. Thanks to this twist, 99.5% of all the engineered mosquitos’ offspring will carry the anti-malaria edit. If we were to release enough engineered mosquitoes into the wild to mate with normal mosquitoes, the malaria blocking gene would spread extremely