Yale University Study: GMO Mosquitoes Bite Back

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Originally Appeared in Presence Marketing News, October 2019
By Steven Hoffman

What happens when a U.K.-based biotech company, Oxitec Ltd., releases tens of millions of mosquitoes in Brazil that were genetically engineered to produce sterile offspring with the intent to combat the spread of diseases such as Zika and malaria? “The idea would be that when these males mated with females, the offspring would die. And therefore, the overall population size of the mosquitoes would decline,” said Yale University professor Jeffrey Powell, who led a research study to assess the results of the experimental release of the GMO mosquitoes into the Brazilian rainforest. “What we found was unexpected. Unpredicted,” he said. According to the study published in September 2019 in Nature, the researchers found hybrids of the GMO mosquitoes and the native mosquitoes – signifying that some of the offspring weren’t sterile, reported WSHU Public Radio. “Evidently, rare viable hybrid offspring between the release strain and the Jacobina population (native mosquito species in Jacobina, Bahia, Brazil) are sufficiently robust to be able to reproduce in nature,” the study’s authors concluded. “We don’t know what the effect of having this hybrid population is. These could be stronger mosquitoes, harder to control,” Powel said. Editorial note: Why do these scientists sound surprised? Anyone in the organic and non-GMO movement could have told you what would happen. In fact, we did. Can you say “Unintended consequences?”