Should we reengineer the world's deadliest animal?
Short Wave
NPR
4.7 • 6.5K Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2026
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. |
| 0:05.8 | The most ferocious predator for us humans is actually quite small. |
| 0:11.4 | It's the mosquito. They are hungry for blood and spreading diseases all the time, including |
| 0:17.6 | serious ones like malaria, yellow fever, and dengue. But what if we could |
| 0:22.1 | wipe out the mosquito? We have the technology to do it, but should we? Here to discuss that |
| 0:28.2 | is Ben Bradford, the host of a new podcast distributed by the NPR network. It's called Are We Doomed? |
| 0:34.1 | It is. Hi, Emily. So, Ben, your podcast, Are We Doomed covers a lot from killer AI to nuclear weapons. And, of course, the bloodthirsty micro predators I want to talk about today. How do you feel about mosquitoes, by the way? I think they're gross and I think they're rude. And you mentioned, Emily, new gene editing techniques could allow us to eradicate our little insect nemesis, potentially |
| 0:54.9 | saving millions of lives. Yes, I learned that from you, from your show. The tech is here. |
| 0:58.8 | Yeah, thank you. And it would be amazing. But also in that technology is something inherently more |
| 1:05.4 | dangerous. I talked to Kevin Sfeldt, who is a biologist now at the MIT Media Lab. |
| 1:16.1 | If you can engineer a mosquito so it can't spread disease, you could engineer a mosquito so it always spreads disease. |
| 1:23.4 | Today on the show, the technology that allows us to kill the mosquito comes with all kinds of complications. |
| 1:31.7 | So what does it mean to try to change an entire species? Who gets to decide what might the ripple effects be? How do you test it? How do you protect it? |
| 2:07.2 | Easy questions, you know. You're listening to on how to save millions of people from malaria by wiping out the mosquito. |
| 2:09.4 | Ben, how does that even work? |
| 2:10.1 | Yeah. |
| 2:12.9 | So let's go back to early last decade. |
| 2:19.0 | Scientists developed a new form of gene editing, which you may know as CRISPR. It's this way of scalpling out a tiny strand of DNA and you kind of like suture in a new trade. It doesn't quite |
| 2:24.1 | look like that. That's essentially what's happening. Yeah. And so with CRISPR, you can cure a genetic |
| 2:30.3 | disease or engineer a cow to grow without horns, both things that they have done in labs. |
| 2:35.0 | But Kevin Esfeld, this biologist now at the MIT Media Lab, had his own realization. |
| 2:41.0 | Turns out it doesn't just let you engineer organisms in the lab. |
... |
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