Via Kite & Key Media — The most dangerous animal to humans? You’ve probably encountered it. In fact, you’ve probably been attacked by it. And now scientists are wondering … what if we just made it extinct? It’s estimated that 108 billion humans have been alive in the history of the species – and that 52 billion have been killed by diseases spread by mosquitoes. And while we’ve made significant progress in recent decades, mosquito-borne diseases are still responsible for an estimated 1 million deaths each year, especially from malaria. That’s led scientists to an interesting question: What if we just killed them all? We now have the technology to render mosquitoes infertile through gene editing, which would cause their populations to collapse. And while scientists are not generally in the business of intentional extinctions, some experts argue that it’d be justified to reduce the scale of suffering – especially for children – caused by mosquito-borne diseases. Not everyone is so sure, as we don’t yet fully understand what the consequences would be. However, a growing number of scientists argue that, instead, we could use the same kinds of biotechnology to disrupt the mechanism by which mosquitoes spread malaria.
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