Bill Gates Wants To End Malaria By Altering Mosquitoes

Bill Gates wants to have a malaria-free world. The billionaire philanthropist promoted the use of a powerful tool genetically modifies mosquitoes to create malaria-resistant mosquitoes. This tool will either make them non-carriers or reduce their numbers.

According to The Verge, there have already been a number of scientists who are using CRISPR, short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, a genetic cut-and-paste tool that allows researchers to specifically edit DNA and create a mosquito that are either infertile or resistant to the malaria parasite. In some other cases, researchers have also used a technology called gene drives which are made to ensure the traits that scientists have introduced are passed on to successive generations.

The tool can effectively identify and get rid of the natural form of DNA when it is seen in the offspring. It promises to quickly spread malaria-resistance through mosquito populations. This is what Bill Gates said could be the most powerful weapon against the disease.

"In less than five years, I think there's a good chance it will be out there," Gates said in an interview with Bloomberg News before speaking at a conference of the American Society for Microbiology in Boston. "This will be a reason we'll take the half-million-a-year kids who die from malaria and drop it dramatically," Gates said.

He was interviewed by ABC medical editor Richard Besser, and he said that the outbreaks of malaria have become too difficult to stop without a more effective vaccine, making new gene-editing technology a potentially more promising route.

Scientists said that in normal reproduction, a mosquito passes on a copy of an altered gene to 50% of its offspring. In a gene drive, an engineered segment of DNA is inserted into the mosquito that causes 100% of its offspring to get the altered gene, which will significantly increase the rate of spread.

"Gene drives, I do think, over the next three to five years will be developed in a form that will be extremely beneficial for knocking down" mosquito populations, Gates said. "Of course, that makes it a key tool to reduce malaria deaths."

The Boston Herald reported that the billionaire also said he hopes that Polio will soon become the second disease to be eliminated in history after small pox. "There's no guarantee, but with luck, the last case of polio should be next year," Gates said.