This program is sponsored by the Covley Foundation based in Los Angeles, California.

The Covley Foundation is dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity.

I'm Alan Olga, and this is Clear In Vivit, conversations about connecting and communicating.

There are people who are mosquito magnets, and there's people like you,

lucky people like you, that you're either actively repellent to them or they ignore you.

I think you're a lovely person, Alan, but you are repellent to mosquitoes.

There is this funny hierarchy in the human race where it's a whole range from people who are actively repellent

to a very, rarely bitten, and then people who are really bothered by them.

You could be the most attractive person at a particular picnic and be the one attacked by the mosquitoes.

But then maybe the next week you play tennis with someone who is much more attractive than you are,

and then you will feel like the person who's being ignored, so a really fascinating scientific problem.

That's Leslie Boshol, whose lab at Rockefeller University in normal times is swarming with mosquitoes.

She and her team are employing not only a room-sized machine to peer into mosquito brains,

but also using pantyhose. Yes, pantyhose, to solve the puzzle of why mosquitoes find us so desirable.

The goal is to explore ways to make us all less tasty, and so to help protect us from human kinds most deadly predator.

This is so great to be talking to you today because while your science is fascinating,

it's also fascinating science that everybody encounters at some point in their life,

the subject of your science, especially the part where mosquitoes bite us.

In the course of your research, how many times have you been bitten?

Thousands of times. Thousands. And it's exactly why I switched to the mosquito

because I got tired of people seeming bored about what I used to work on.

So everybody understands why it's important to study the mosquito. Everyone has been bitten.

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