Release of genetically altered mosquitoes in the Keys needs better public vetting than it’s had | Opinion

Can it ever be wise to release genetically altered organisms into the natural environment? Maybe. Sometimes. Unfortunately, this momentous question might be irrevocably distorted by a release that is set to occur in the Florida Keys later this year.

The release is potentially precedent-setting, and it probably shouldn’t be interpreted that way.

The plan, developed by the biotech firm Oxitec, is to release millions of male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that have been genetically modified so that their female progeny can develop only if they are exposed to tetracycline, an antibiotic.

If all goes as predicted, the released mosquitoes will mate with wild-type females, the female offspring will die, and — with fewer adult females to produce the next generation — the A. aegypti population will plummet.

This would have a public-health benefit. In the Keys, A. aegypti is blamed for transmitting the virus that causes dengue fever, a sometimes severe and occasionally fatal illness. The species can also transmit Zika virus, chikungunya and yellow fever.

It’s a technically clever proposal, and it’s not without some merit. Nobody wants those illnesses — although, an outbreak in 2020 notwithstanding, the incidence of dengue in the Keys is not very great, and the others have not yet been found in the Keys.

Nor does the mosquito seem particularly worth cherishing. If the releases were sustained over time and went really well, it’s conceivable that A. aegypti would be entirely eliminated. But it was introduced to the Keys relatively recently and probably has not come to play a vital ecological role there, and the Keys are blessed with many other mosquito species standing by to take its place. Since male mosquitoes don’t bite, Oxitec’s releases would not be very bothersome.

Opponents of the plan point out that some female larvae survive the Oxitec alteration, Oxitec’s calculations to the contrary. They also claim that those mosquitoes might pose a threat both to the people they bite and to the environment.

It’s true that the release could have been studied longer, more openly and in greater depth. At the same time, the claim of a threat has the you-never-know quality that’s common in debates about genetically modified organisms: Maybe it hasn’t been totally ruled out that mosquitoes with Oxitec’s novel genes pose special risks to people or anything else, but it’s hard to see what the risks would be. And the alternative is to spray insecticide.

Nonetheless, the release remains very controversial in the Keys, and it is in interactions with the public that the proposal is most disappointing. In a 2016 referendum in Monroe County, the county overall solidly approved the release, but Key West, where the release was to have occurred, voted against it. Given the opposition and the novelty of using genetic editing techniques to change the environment, the proposal warranted a thorough and transparent public deliberation, and that hasn’t happened.

In the 10 years since the proposal was first floated, there have been many opportunities for public input—including the referendum, public hearings by the state and a 30-day comment period held by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2019. In 2020, after the EPA gave its approval, Oxitec itself held a public webinar about the proposal (135 people attended, although some percentage were stakeholders or scholars from out of state), but the goal of this event seems to have been merely to defend the proposal.

What’s missing is structured, balanced, impartially run public deliberation that would encourage people to learn from experts, share their thoughts and questions, and engage in balanced discussion with citizens who do not share their views.

A proposal as novel as the release of millions of genetically altered mosquitoes is shot through with moral ambiguities and tensions: How should we think about the you-never-know kinds of concerns; are risks and uncertainties more troubling with genetic technologies? Do we want to be editing nature at all, or do we already in some sense edit nature all the time? Is editing nature by altering a genome fundamentally different from editing nature by, say, spraying insecticide? What is nature, come to think of it? Would allowing the Oxitec release imply that any and every proposed wild release of a genetically edited organism should be allowed?

The American chestnut has been wiped out by a fungus accidentally imported from Asia, and it might be that giving the tree a gene derived from wheat would allow it to withstand the blight and let it flourish again in Eastern forests.

And in sub-Saharan Africa, mosquitoes in the Anopheles genus are a link in the life cycle of the parasite that causes malaria; possibly, a genetic alteration that at least temporarily suppressed the populations of those mosquitoes could suppress or eliminate the parasite and save the lives of roughly half a million children per year.

These cases must be hedged with “might’ and “possibly” both because the science is not wholly worked out and because they, too, depend on questions that need public deliberation. In fact, the questions really should be taken up not just locally — that is, at the site of the proposed release —and by immediate stakeholders, but broadly, across boundaries and perspectives.

We are all stakeholders in some sense in the natural phenomena that we are proposing to alter through genetic technologies. For these larger projects, too, the Oxitec proposal is a disappointment.

Gregory E. Kaebnick, Ph.D., is a research scholar at The Hastings Center and editor of the Hastings Center Report. He is a principal investigator on a Hastings project on gene editing in the wild.