ABSTRACT
A popular global public health agenda is aimed at reducing the burden of vector-borne diseases. One approach under hot pursuit is to engineer “gene drive” mosquitoes that would be capable of delivering genes that would disrupt disease transmission to virtually every individual mosquito in a wild breeding population. This chapter explores how these “designer mosquitoes” challenge our ideas about the appropriate scale and scope of human intervention in planetary ecosystems. It does so by comparing two varieties of gene-drive mosquitoes under development: those aimed at locally exterminating vector species and others aimed at replacing wild vector populations with versions incapable of transmitting disease altogether. The chapter sketches the different technopolitics at play in attempts to eliminate, versus replace, insect vectors, which by seeking opposite avenues for living with mosquitoes, may differ in their political, social, ecological and health implications, and in the ways they reshape human–mosquito relationships.
