Science In My Fiction

Immunology is a rapidly developing science, but it still isn’t well-known or well-understood. And it shows, especially in science fiction. Time travelers and aliens easily adjust to life on present-day Earth without the need for vaccinations. Humans explore unknown planets with breathable atmospheres without any protection from the millions of potentially disease-causing microbes all around them. Or they willingly remove what protection they have…*cough*Prometheus*cough*. It’s practically a tautology; an atmosphere that can support life is a safe atmosphere for humanoids to breathe. H. G. Wells more accurately portrayed the consequences of making this assumption in War of the Worlds. When the invading aliens were exposed to Earth’s atmosphere, they were eventually killed off by microbial infections.

This glaring oversight is sort of understandable, though. Immunology, the study of the immune system, is a relatively new field of science. The germ theory of disease wasn’t even validated until the late 19th century. Antibodies, complex proteins that enable the immune system to adapt to and remember past infections so that you generally don’t get sick again from the same thing, weren’t fully characterized until the 1960s. Gerald Edelman, Joseph Gally and Rodney Porter won a Nobel Prize for finally putting the pieces together. It was sort of a big deal.

If there is any life in an alien environment, there will be microbes. Higher forms of life may show up as well, but microbes are a guarantee if we are assuming that life is involved. If these microbes are from an alien environment, then every single one of them could be completely foreign to your immune system. There are a couple of different ways this could play out.

Microbes that cause disease generally do so entirely by accident. A survival mechanism of the invading organism just happens to interact with your bodily systems in such a way as to cause sickness or death. This is why our ability to recognize something as ‘foreign’ and get rid of it quickly is so important. Immune cells ‘see’ microbes by recognizing proteins or structures that are microbe-specific, either through specialized receptors, antibodies or other immune proteins. Given that your immune system is being exposed to something it has never encountered before, it may be entirely unable to recognize these new microbes as microbes. This would basically mean that you would be defenseless against any incidentally lethal effects they might have on your cells.

Some of the mechanisms humans have evolved for dealing with foreign microbes are particularly unpleasant. The symptoms you experience when you have a cold or the flu, for example, are actually caused by your immune system trying to rid your body of the virus. The additional mucus protects your vulnerable membranes. The increase in body temperature makes for an inhospitable environment to viral replication. Your cells that are already infected are targeted and destroyed to prevent the spread of infection. The immune response, if activated strongly enough, has the potential to kill you outright…as those with severe allergies are well aware. The prospect that your immune system would respond to foreign microbes on an alien world is at least as terrifying as it not responding at all.

Of course, it is also entirely possible that nothing would happen at all. Whatever microbes that developed on this hypothetical planet may not be able to survive inside of a human body. They may not have the potential to negatively affect human cells while simultaneously being alien enough that the immune system doesn’t recognize them. The point is that whenever someone breathes in an alien atmosphere they are taking a serious risk, and that risk is often ignored or glossed over in science fiction.

This problem applies even more strongly to human time travelers, who are already susceptible to human diseases but simply do not have the immunity or the vaccinations to protect them against the latest strain of measles or influenza. They could also introduce diseases from their own time, like smallpox or multi-drug resistant bacteria, which present-day Earth is poorly equipped to deal with. The results could be devastating.

Humans are bacteria factories. Our mouths, guts and skin are absolutely coated with microbes. Our immune system has been adapting to all of these microbes since we were born and recognizes them as ‘normal’ rather than foreign. They generally don’t cause disease unless something goes wrong. In fact, we would quite literally die without them. But introducing our normal bacteria into a foreign environment could have disastrous consequences, and I’m pretty sure that accidentally causing a plague or wiping out the local population would violate the prime directive as well as significantly alter the course of history.

I am not suggesting that any piece of science fiction will receive a fail for *gasp* scientific inaccuracy if it doesn’t acknowledge the immunological implications of every decision being made. Requiring exposition describing vaccinations or atmospheric safety precautions would be boring and honestly irrelevant in many cases. But sometimes it is relevant and could really add something to the story. Good science fiction makes you think…about the future, and about how we might deal with extraordinary circumstances. Even if most people don’t know how their immune system works, disease is something that we all know and fear. Acknowledging the risk of personal contamination or plague in the right context creates character anxiety and drama because it is instantly relatable, even in an alien environment.

The absurd complexity of the immune system itself, combined with the infinite variety of microbial life, makes for a well-spring of potential creativity. You can’t remove microbes from the picture. They are part of us, and they will be a part of any ecosystem that supports life. These are obstacles that humanity will have to overcome if we ever hope to explore new worlds. What better way to inspire their solutions than through science fiction?

Literally. Parasites hijack our bodies, manipulate our thoughts and emotions, and even use us as incubation chambers for cute little baby parasites. And it terrifies us! The very idea of some outside entity invading us…not just our world, but you and me specifically…gets inside of our heads and makes our skin crawl. Which is why they make such great Sci-Fi monsters! They’re everywhere! Movies, television, literature…we can’t get enough of the creepy little guys. The Xenomorphs from the Alien franchise are arguably one of the most iconic parasitic organisms ever, with a complex life-cycle that requires a human host. Stargate SG-1 has the Goa’uld, parasites that integrate with their human hosts rather than bursting out of their chests. Even in children’s literature you have the Yeerks; evil space slugs from the Animorphs novels who tried to enslave humanity via the ear canal.

Noticing a bit of a trend? If you look at AMC’s list of the Top Ten Parasite Movies, more than half of them feature an alien parasite. Even though parasites are common right here on Earth, their life cycle is so radically different from ours it feels alien. Especially to those of us living in developed countries with treated water and clean food, where parasitic infections have been largely eliminated. In many parts of the world however, especially in areas with poor sewage treatment, parasites are still a day-to-day problem.

What most people imagine when they think of the term ‘parasite’ are intestinal parasites. Hookworms, roundworms, pinworms and the like colonize the intestinal tract as adults, laying eggs that are shed in feces. The eggs and larvae then spread via contaminated water to other animals, including humans. Gross. They don’t reach full maturity until they find a host though, so their life cycle actually depends on obtaining this ideal host environment. Different species of parasites have adapted a wide variety of techniques for improving their odds of finding the host they need.

For example, Toxoplasma gondii is a parasitic germ whose primary host is cats. It can infect other animals, but is only capable of sexual reproduction in cats. When T. gondii infects rats it actually alters their brain chemistry to make them attracted to the scent of cat urine, thereby increasing the likelihood that the parasite will end up inside of a cat, along with its current host. It’s a very subtle manipulation of the intermediate host to get the parasite where it wants to be. Kind of like mind control.

Opiocordyceps unilateralis, known as the zombie-ant fungus, functions in a way that is entirely like mind control. When this parasitic fungus infects a carpenter ant, it manipulates the host into leaving the colony and attaching itself to the underside of a leaf. The fungus prefers to grow in this environment. When the ant dies, the fungal stalk erupts from its body and produces spores…which drift down to the forest floor and infect other ants.

Most parasites try to avoid killing their hosts. Why mess with a free ride, after all? But that is certainly not always the case. Certain species of wasp, known as parasitoid wasps because they ultimately destroy the host, lay their eggs inside other insects. When the eggs hatch, the juvenile wasps eat their way out of the living host without so much as a ‘thank you’. Parasitoid wasps are often cited as the inspiration for the Xenomorph life cycle.

So you see, we don’t need to look to outer space or science fiction to be creeped out by parasites. There’s plenty of creepiness to go around here at home.

Ah, the zombie plague! A Mad Scientist couldn’t ask for a better means for world domination. Not only would discreet application of your infectious agent eliminate your opposition, the rest of humanity will be far too busy fending of their recently deceased loved ones to notice when you swoop in and take control. The population is reduced to a more manageable size, and the ever-present zombie threat will keep any potential rebellions from forming. Everybody wins! Well, mostly I win but you get my point.

But how to make it happen? There’s a good reason no one has ever pulled off the ‘Take Over the World by Zombie Plague’ scheme before…it’s an awful lot to ask of a single infectious agent. It must be transmitted from person to person, or even across species, quickly and with a low infectious dose. It has to fend off the immune system and penetrate the blood-brain barrier to get at your delicious brain meats. It has to basically turn your body into a walking incubation chamber, dedicated solely to feeding and spreading the infection. Still, these obstacles are not insurmountable when one has the power of Mad Science.

To put things into perspective, it is important to understand that the things that make us sick – viruses, bacteria, parasites, what-have-you – have been around a lot longer than we have, and they’ve gotten very good at what they do. And what they do isn’t very nice…we certainly don’t think so, anyway. The pathogens causing the infection are just doing what they have to do to survive and replicate in a hostile environment: You. In many cases, the characteristics that make this possible are a lucky coincidence for the pathogen and an unfortunate side-effect for the host. For example, a surface protein that makes a bacteria more resilient in the soil may also protect it from your immune system. If that bacteria spends enough time in a human host, it’s going to get better and better at exploiting that characteristic so that it can survive longer and reproduce more.

The longer this process goes on, the more specifically attuned the pathogen has the potential to become. Humans haven’t really been around very long, evolutionarily speaking. Bacteria however are some of the oldest forms of life, and the viruses that infect them, known as bacteriophages, have been fine-tuning the process for an exceptionally long time. So much so that many bacteriophages only infect one species of bacteria. They have become so specialized in exploiting the characteristics of their favorite bacteria that they have lost the ability to infect others.

Pox viruses are some of the oldest viruses that infect mammalian cells, and they have developed a similar level of species-specificity. A human could drink a vial of rabbit pox and be completely unaffected. That level of control would be useful…but that isn’t really what we want, is it? No, we want something new and flashy and explosively infectious. The Ebola virus only broke onto the ‘human infectious agent’ scene in 1976 and it has already made quite the impact. The virus itself destroys blood vessels and prevents blood from coagulating, producing lots of infectious fluids and causing death through hypovolemic shock. Bats are the most likely animal reservoir for the virus as well, which is pretty badass. Can you imagine zombie bats? I can. It’s awesome.

Unfortunately, viruses that are capable of infecting multiple species don’t generally affect them in the same way. The bats infected with Ebola aren’t leaking blood everywhere and birds infected with influenza haven’t come down with the flu. That’s because these species are carriers. While the virus is still present, it isn’t causing disease. Like the bacteria living in the soil that happen to have an adaptation that causes disease in humans, these viruses have a stable existence within their animal reservoirs. They only cause disease when they jump to humans, a less familiar environment. This is actually what makes Bird Flu so potentially dangerous. Multiple strains of influenza can infect the same animal, allowing for exceptionally rapid genetic recombination and the development of new strains our immune system has never seen. Many different animal species are reservoirs for human disease including pigs, armadillos and deer…but while they may be useful in delivering your zombie plague to the masses, your undead horde wont be accompanied by zombie armadillos. I’ll give you a moment to recover from the crushing disappointment.

So how will our zombie plague be spread? There’s a lot to consider here. Not only does the infection have to reach a lot of people, it also has to reach their delicious brains. The human brain is a fairly important organ. The blood-brain barrier carefully restricts access to the cerebrospinal fluid, protecting your tender brain from most bacterial infections as well as inflammation. Inflammation is your immune systems first response to a potential invader, but in the brain this can cause swelling and tissue damage. To prevent this, the blood-brain barrier keeps out the cells and antibodies of your immune system as well as the bacteria. There is certainly precedent for overcoming this obstacle, however. Rabies virus is spread through infected saliva and can travel from a bite wound to the brain, bypassing this barrier. Sound familiar?

But once our virus gets to the brain, how would it go about turning your average person into a shambling virus factory? Well honestly, you don’t really need most of that big brain you have. Sure, that cerebellum helps you coordinate your movements but shambling is totally in this year. As a proud soldier in the undead horde, you don’t really need to make any complex decisions so screw that  frontal lobe. And all that memory processing and spatial navigation provided by your hippocampus? Bah. All you really need is your amygdala…the primitive reptile brain, that generates the ‘fight or flight’ response. Just get rid of the rest and you’re good to go. Well, figuratively speaking.

So we’re looking for an infectious agent that can be introduced to the population in a relatively innocuous way – such as through an animal reservoir – that can penetrate the blood-brain barrier, destroy all that unnecessary brain tissue, and leave the host a shambling plague factory….preferably oozing with infectious particles. Now I’m sure most of you are thinking viruses are the way to go here, but I’ve got one word for you: Prions.

Prions are basically infectious proteins. We don’t know a lot about them yet, but they are the causative agent behind spongiform encephalopathies such as Mad Cow disease and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. Mad Cow disease can be transmitted to humans who eat infected tissue, and there is some evidence that prions can become airborne and cause disease at a surprisingly low infectious dose (in mice, anyway). Since all they are is a single protein, they have no trouble slipping past the blood-brain barrier and wreaking havoc with your neurons. When the misfolded prion protein encounters other proteins in the brain, it acts as a template that causes the misfolding of these healthy proteins, thereby propagating itself. Prion diseases are currently untreatable, even. The only real downside is the long incubation time, but I’m still pretty confident that prions are the way to go in terms of zombie plague development.

Even if you aren’t trying to take over the world (and why wouldn’t you be?!?), the zombie plague is exceptionally useful as a modeling tool for the spread of highly infectious diseases. It’s also a powerful motivator for getting people interested in how diseases spread. You can try your hand at destroying the world with the zombie plague or building your own custom pathogen to see how fast you can infect the world. Preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse is also a fun way to be prepared for more routine disasters that people do face daily.

Nerds never get tired of discussing the End of the World. The question of what the rest of us would do if some significant portion of the population was ‘gone’ (abducted by aliens, turned into zombies, killed by a plague, wiped out in a war, etc.) is one of the most popular themes in science fiction. For good reason, since it allows us to explore interesting questions about our own nature. How would I respond to a crisis? Would I survive the zombie apocalypse? Pretty much every nerd I know has a Zombie Attack Plan and has assessed their home for the level of protection it would provide against the Horde.

The speculation is half the fun, really. No one knows how the world will end. There may be an invasion of robotic vikings from Omicron Persei VII next February. Things may continue on without a hitch until about four billion years from now when our sun expands enough to vaporize the planet. If anything does go down though, the nerds will be ready. We’ve practically been preparing for it our whole lives. In case of zombies, we all have our weapon of choice picked out and probably within easy reach.  At the first signs of global pandemic, we’ll all move to Madagascar. Whatever the scenario, we have a plan in mind. We just ask what Batman would do.

Imagining the worst and preparing for it mentally, even if it’s all in fun, is what really gives us the edge. I recommend picking your favorite disaster scenario and preparing for it as thoroughly as possible. You’d be surprised how much overlap there is between, say zombie and earthquake preparedness. Of course, survival in the long term in case some major disaster actually does cause society to collapse is a bit tougher to plan for. As a microbiologist, I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that in a post-apocalyptic society I will have very few marketable skills. What about you? When society collapses, will you still be able to hold your own? Or will you end up a walking plot device waiting to be rescued by the main characters? How secure would you be in the event of a zombie attack?

It’s hard to find good help these days. Minions come and go like valence electrons; as soon as you get one of them trained to handle the radioactive waste disposal they end up frying themselves with the Death Ray and you have to start all over again. What a waste of time! Get too many of them together and they start talking about ‘benefits’ and ‘occupational hazards’ and you have to dump the lot of them in the Acid Pit…and who is going to clean up that mess?!?

But imagine if you could screen potential minions for certain…desirable traits before going through the tedious process of hiring, training and eliminating anyone who knows too much? What if you could determine, from just a small sample of genetic material, whether your applicant has the right mix of ability, ignorance and lack of motivation to make the perfect minion? Have a look at their genome and see for yourself!

‘Hold on a tick!’ You may be thinking. ‘Genetic sequencing is a big plorking deal! The Human Genome Project took over ten years and cost a metric butt-ton of cash! I am suspicious of you and your claims.’

And what an informed consumer you are! When the Human Genome Project set out to map the genetics of Homo sapiens sapiens in 1990, the project was expected to take 15 years and cost around $3 billion dollars. They did it in ten (mostly). Sequencing technology continued to advance as the project went on, allowing the researchers to progress at an unanticipated rate. That advancement has continued unabated. The scientists working on the HGP broke the human genome up into chunks of DNA about 150,000 base-pairs long, sequenced the chunks, and then reassembled them into the complete genome. To put this into perspective, the human genome contains 3.3 billion base-pairs. Making things even more difficult, the human genome also contains more segmental duplications than any other mammalian species. These are basically sections of DNA that are nearly identical and are repeated over and over again. Imagine trying to put together a puzzle when you don’t know what the final picture will look like. Then imagine that a sizable chunk of the pieces you do have are identical and are repeated again and again throughout the puzzle. You could be missing pieces, or you may have duplicate pieces, and oh yeah…the pieces are the size of molecules and there are thousands of them. You can see why that might be a wee bit difficult.

But lo, the future is now! We have many advantages that were unheard of in 1990. Next generation, high-throughput sequencing techniques have been developed to produce thousands of sequences at once. And they do it cheaply! The cost of sequencing has plummeted in recent years, dropping from hundreds of millions in 2001 to thousands in 2010. Not only can we generate the puzzle pieces faster and at significantly reduced cost, we now have a picture to look at while we are assembling them in the form of the groundbreaking work performed by the HGP. This moves things right along.

But the HGP didn’t stop there! They have continued to sequence the genomes of other organisms, as well as collect information about the function of the genes identified in the human genome. This information is available to the public online through GenBank. The HapMap project collects differences between individual human genomes. Changes as small as a single base-pair, if observed consistently, could explain why patients react differently to the same medication or why one person is more prone to a certain type of cancer. If you know what to look for, you don’t even need to sequence an entire genome to diagnose a patient…you can just check for these specific sequences.

What? Oh, you don’t care if your minions are prone to diabetes or whether they might have an allergic reaction to your mind-wiping drugs? Well an intelligent customer such as yourself must realize that human traits such as personality, athletic ability and sexual orientation simply do not correspond to specific genes being present or absent. Our genetic make-up is a rather mind-bogglingly big and complex thing. Not only do the genes themselves matter, but when and how they are turned on matters as well, and so does how they are processed and translated into proteins. The proteins themselves, once generated according to the genetic blueprint, can be processed in several different ways and can also be involved in turning other genes on and off. And don’t get me started on the role of the environment! External factors can also affect how genes are expressed, really making it impossible to pin down a single element responsible for just about any one trait. Many human diseases, such as cancer and lupus, are generally the result of several small things going slightly wrong. Rather than having a single smoking gun, you have several different paths that lead you to the same place.

But the power of genome sequencing is undeniable! The potential as a diagnostic tool alone could dramatically affect medicine and how pharmaceuticals are administered. In terms of agriculture, it can revolutionize the way farmers select for specific traits in their crops. It can even make chocolate better! And as the cost of sequencing decreases and more data becomes available, who knows where it will take us? So you see why this is a prime investment opportunity. Why don’t you put away the Death Ray and we can discuss the figures over coffee?

Superpowers are undeniably cool. Who wouldn’t want super strength, or the ability to fly? Superpowered characters are popular in science fiction because, among other things, they allow us to explore what life would be like without the physical limitations we experience as humans. But it doesn’t stop there. Energy manipulation, teleportation…some superhumans push past the boundaries of our technological limitations as well, performing with a thought feats that your average physicist can only dream about reproducing someday.

Unfortunately, while we can strive to replicate the effects of some super powers with technology, there aren’t any real superhumans. Well, some people claim to be psychic…but nobody really takes them seriously, right? After all, if they could really predict the future they’d be making a fortune off the stock market and winning the lottery every week.

Which raises an interesting question. If superhuman abilities actually appeared in our modern society, how would they be used? In literature, superhumans generally only have two options: use their enhanced abilities to do good things and become a hero, or do bad things and become a villain. You can try stalling, but sooner or later Uncle Ben is going to die and you have to choose your path. That seems awfully limited, don’t you think? It’s true, someone with super strength and invulnerability would make a good crime fighter. He’d also be really good at demolitions and handy to have at a construction site. An honest-to-goodness telepath would be highly sought after in the business world. The practical applications  for someone capable of teleportation are mind-boggling…just imagine a delivery guy who could arrive with your pizza minutes after you placed your order. Wow.

This concept of extraordinary abilities being used to accomplish ordinary tasks isn’t an original one. Throughout science fiction, superhumans have occasionally used their abilities for mundane purposes. In Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again, the Flash was coerced into running on a giant hamster wheel that provided electrical power to a third of the United States. Babylon 5 featured the Psi Corp, a government agency that conscripted psychics and telepaths into civil service. Every once in a while some mutants in the X-men Universe will be enslaved and forced to use their powers to rebuild Genosha for the umpteenth time or something. There always seems to be some form of coercion, though. No one ever thinks of offering them a job with competitive salary and benefits. Is enslavement and conscription really necessary when you can pay people to do what you want?

Now I imagine that it would be more challenging to write an interesting story about a superhuman that worked in construction as opposed to being in the world-saving business, but not everyone has to be a hero! Certainly not all the time, anyway. In a society like ours, it makes more sense that people with enhanced abilities would find ways to put them to more practical, and profitable, uses. Even heroes have to pay the bills, after all. Why not take advantage of their unique abilities to do so?

But wait! ‘With great power there must also come – great responsibility!’ You know, I think that’s part of the problem. Superhumans have been used to tell stories about morality and big ethical questions for as long as they’ve been around. It’s iconic. Good versus evil, and all that jazz. The idea that you must use your abilities in a way that benefits your society is as entrenched as the idea that you must keep the fact that you have special abilities a secret. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I love those stories, but as much as I enjoy reading about this Chosen One or that Super Hero, injecting a little more capitalism and practicality into the worlds of the superhumans would make for some really interesting storytelling. It could inspire more relatable characters, and take the super-powered paradigm in new directions. After all, what these stories do best is inspire and comment on society as a whole…and society as a whole is pretty capitalistic. If I woke up with psychic powers, the first thing I would do is buy myself a lottery ticket.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Giant insects make great movie monsters. Everyone deals with bugs on a daily basis – usually by squishing or exterminating them. We all know what they look like and what they can do, and I think we’re all a little bit terrified of what would happen if the insects of the world decided to take revenge on humanity. They outnumber us. They have built in pincers and fangs and wings and armor. They are proportionally stronger, faster, and tougher than humans. Really the only thing keeping them in check is their size. Take that limitation away, and they would overrun the world.

Insects haven’t always been the tiny nuisances we’re familiar with today, though. During the carboniferous period, the Meganeura dragonfly had a wingspan of 28 inches. The Arthropleura, a relative of the millipede, could grow over 8 feet long. It was the largest known land invertebrate of all time. A majority of insect diversity has escaped the fossil record because the exoskeleton is made of chitin, a material that simply doesn’t preserve well.  Every insect during the carboniferous period wasn’t a giant, but just imagine what else could have been wriggling around in a world with dragonflies the size of hawks and millipedes the size of boa constrictors! So why aren’t there any super bugs nowadays? Why did they get smaller over time?

To answer that you have to understand how insects breathe. Mammals absorb oxygen through the lungs, which is then transported throughout the body via the circulatory system. In insects, the circulatory and respiratory systems are separate. Oxygen is delivered directly to the cells via a complex series of tubes called the tracheal system. The tubes allow gas exchange to occur between the cells and the air. Oxygen diffuses in, and carbon dioxide diffuses out. It’s not really very efficient. The larger an insect is, the larger the tracheal system has to be to support respiration. Eventually you run out of room for other organs. How big an insect can grow is limited by its ability to breathe.

Ok, so maybe giant insects don’t make such great movie monsters when you know they could never actually get that big without suffocating. So how were they able to get so large during the Carboniferous period? Well, for one thing the Earth was covered in vast, swampy forests at the time. That’s actually where the time period gets its name, since the plant matter deposited then forms the majority of the planets’ modern coal deposits. All of this plant life absorbed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and produced oxygen. It is estimated that atmospheric oxygen levels in the Carboniferous period were as high as 35%, compared with 21% today. The most widely accepted theory is that with a higher oxygen concentration, the tracheal system was able to function more efficiently and insects were able to grow much larger.

Knowing that, the Mad Scientist in me wants nothing more than to get some atmospherically controlled tanks and breed me some giant spiders. It’s fool proof, don’t you see? If they ever escaped, they’d suffocate in normal atmosphere! No need to fear them turning against their creator or running amok in the nearest city. Spider silk, with its incredible tensile strength and flexibility, has been the Holy Grail of the textile industry for decades. Obviously the solution is just to build a bigger spider. Also, giant spiders are cool.

Unfortunately, it’s been a long time since the Carboniferous period. A little something called evolution has been going on since then, and modern insects are adapted to a modern atmosphere. Researchers have examined the tracheal systems in insects of various sizes, and they have found that as insects increase in size the tracheal system also increases at a disproportionately higher rate.  Modern beetles, for example, can not grow larger than approximately six inches no matter how high the oxygen concentration is because the tracheal system still takes up too much room. In the Carboniferous period, the trachea were likely much narrower in diameter. With the higher oxygen concentration, the smaller tubes could have delivered enough oxygen to support larger insects.

Given enough time in a more oxygen-rich environment, you can bet that at least some insects would become super-sized. Unfortunately for me and my plans for world domination, it would happen on an evolutionary scale and not because some spiders were accidentally zapped with gamma radiation. Ah well, back to the drawing board.

This is some seriously cool shit. Entomologists and geneticists at the University of Arizona modified a single gene in the Anopheles stephensi mosquito in the hope of shortening its lifespan to the point where the malaria parasite would be unable to mature fully before the host died. Instead, they entirely blocked infection by Plasmodium falciparum, the primary human malaria parasite. They still don’t understand entirely why it worked (you can find the actual published data here), but by all accounts it sure seems to.

Malaria is one of those diseases that kills a million or so people each year, but because nearly all of those million people live in third-world countries not much gets done about it. Drug companies can’t make much profit from making a drug that only poor people would buy, so progress has been slow. In fact, most of the current efforts to fight malaria revolve around mosquito control rather than targeting the parasite. There’s some really cool research going on here at the University of Florida that revolves around designing pesticides that target the mosquitoes’ uniquely alkaline digestive system, theoretically leaving other insects, fish and humans (with our acidic digestive systems) unaffected.

But what good is this new Mutant Mosquito going to do, besides maybe inspiring the next SyFy channel original movie? It’s far too early to say anything for sure, but some of the articles I’ve read are excited about replacing wild mosquitoes with the mutant construct. This seems pretty unlikely to me, given that the mutation reduces the mosquito’s lifespan, and therefore its breeding window, by about 20%. That’s not going to compete successfully with the wild mosquitoes.

The other argument is the ‘What have we wrought?!?’ conundrum, which is what I really wanted to explore here. No one is seriously suggesting that we should introduce these new mosquitoes into the wild, but the potential to take a lab-created organism and replace an existing one with it is fraught with interesting moral and ethical questions.

First, can we really predict every possible outcome? What if something goes horribly wrong once the mosquitoes are released? Isn’t that what happened with the love bugs? Those stupid things are everywhere!

Ok, the story about the love bugs being created in a lab and accidentally released is amusing and all, but it’s a myth. We have snopes.com for a reason.

This post is reprinted with the author’s permission.