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Here’s a report on current developments:
Scientists are at work developing silkworms that produce pharmaceuticals instead of silk, honeybees resilient enough to resist pesticides and even mosquitoes capable of delivering vaccines, instead of disease, with every bite….
For instance, silkworms are being engineered to produce not silk, but pharmaceutical or industrial proteins of various kinds. And researchers are trying to design honeybees resistant to pesticides, diseases and parasites, which have severely cut down the population of beneficial bees in the United States….
Some bugs on the drawing board would be designed to control other human diseases such as dengue fever, Chagas’ disease and sleeping sickness. There’s even a research program that would use mosquito bites to deliver vaccines to entire human populations, eliminating the need for doctors and nurses to round up patients and use needles.
The thing is, insects, like all other living creatures, evolve over time. Not only that, insects appear to evolve quite quickly. It’s well-known, for example, that insects have rapidly evolved resistance to many insecticides:
FORT COLLINS—Insecticide resistance is one of the most widespread genetic changes caused by human activity, and scientists are only now beginning to understand these changes that allow global populations of insects to evolve resistance and become unaffected by pesticides. A new study by a team of worldwide researchers, including Colorado State University biology professor Tom Wilson, has made a major scientific breakthrough in understanding the genetics of insecticide resistance.
In a paper to be published in the Sept. 27 edition of the journal Science, Wilson and his colleagues identify the gene responsible for resistance in Drosophila, the common fruit fly. The ability of this fly to develop pesticide resistance is due to a mutation in a single gene known as DDT-R. The team’s new research results show that the overactivity of this gene alone is both necessary and sufficient for insecticide resistance.
“It is common for insecticides to work well for several years but then loose their effectiveness, because insects evolve resistance to these poisons,” said Wilson. “Because it is difficult to conduct genetic research on most pest insects, the genetics of this evolution has long remained a mystery. However, our current research has identified, for the first time, a gene responsible for insecticide resistance and how it became mutated in a model insect.”
Whatever these things are when you release them into the environment, they’re not going to stay that way. I’m not a biologist, but it appears to me that it’s completely unpredictable in what way they may evolve. The possibility of releasing genetically modified insects into the environment make me very uncomfortable.
