Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming (32 page)

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“THE KEY ISSUE,”
said Oxitec’s founder, Luke Alphey, “is that we need to get enough wild females to mate with them. It’s a question of quantity and quality. This is the quality test: Are the males sexy? Are they fit? Are they healthy? Are they happy?” In mosquitoes, he said, there were indirect proxies for determining this. Longevity was easily measured, and unfit
Aedes aegypti
died young. Size mattered: Small mosquitoes have smaller energy reserves. Maybe there was something to symmetry. Attractive humans were symmetrical. “Kylie Minogue has a symmetrical face,” he told me when I visited him in England. But the only way to really know if females would accept a genetically modified male instead of the natural variety was to do field tests, and that was why dengue’s expansion to GM-friendly places like Key West was so important to Oxitec.

Neither Alphey nor his company oversold the disease’s complex link to climate change, but Oxitec’s Web site sent visitors to a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council singling out global warming as a major factor in dengue’s global expansion, and its own pages also highlighted warming’s impact. “With the progression of climate change and the globalisation of travel and trade,” read a section marked “Epidemiology,” “it is predicted that dengue fever may spread further outside the current tropical zones.” Climate change was, at the very least, yet another reason that the world might want to buy Oxitec’s products.

Alphey’s office was on the second floor of a brick building covered in wild grapevines, surrounded by a well-kept lawn and a copse of trees at the edge of an industrial park a dozen miles from Oxford University. The office itself was modest, mostly undecorated but for a scattering of papers, and Alphey, forty-seven, was tall and fit looking. He had a moderately symmetrical face. While activists have attacked Oxitec for its perceived secrecy, with me the former Oxford professor was an eager teacher, happy to spend the morning explaining the science behind his crowning invention.

He called it RIDL: “release of insects carrying a dominant lethal.” Protected by U.S. Patent application 11,733,737 (“the invention relates to a non-human multicellular organism carrying a dominant lethal genetic system”), it was, in Alphey’s explanation, a new way to carry out what was an old method of bug suppression. In the 1950s, entomologists had pioneered the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT): irradiating lab-raised fruit flies or tsetse flies, then releasing them. They mated with wild females but could produce no offspring. Unfortunately, mosquitoes were too fragile for SIT; the radiation killed them. So Alphey had sought a way to bake auto-elimination into their genes. He found it in a synthetic DNA known as tTA—a fusion of DNA segments from the bacteria
E. coli
and the herpes simplex virus—which he soon began inserting into
Aedes aegypti
. One difference between Alphey’s technique and traditional SIT was that the mosquitoes it created were not technically sterile. They could mate and produce offspring, but these would not grow past the larval stage without the presence of an antidote, the common antibiotic tetracycline. In Oxitec’s mosquito nursery, there was ample tetracycline. In nature, in theory, there was not.

In one study to test RIDL, Alphey had placed OX513As in one set of cages, unmodified males in another, and thrown in some “wild type” females. The OX513As were clumsy: They inseminated just over half as many partners, possibly because they ran out of sperm, and, unlike their rivals, seemed unable to distinguish between virgin and sullied wild-type females. But over a short time frame, three days, the modified and unmodified lines performed equally well. For investors, this might have looked like a silver lining: Not only would Oxitec have to produce and release swarms big enough to compete with the native population; it would have to do so quite often. A good rule of thumb, Alphey said, was twenty modded mosquitoes per week per human. “For a city of 5 million people,” he wrote in a paper, perhaps imagining Miami or Madrid or Ahmedabad or Belo Horizonte or any number of second cities in the third world, “this would correspond to releasing 100 million males per week.”

To those wary of genetic modification, intentionally releasing a transgenic organism into the wild might seem far scarier than optimizing an already domesticated crop. This is what the agricultural behemoth Monsanto, the world’s biggest seed company and first name in gene engineering, does over the howls of activists. But products like Monsanto’s—supercotton, supercorn—were designed to outcompete traditional varieties, Alphey pointed out. They were built to live. Oxitec’s products, on the other hand, were built to die. “Self-limiting is much better politically,” he told me. “You can say to regulators: If I stop releasing it, it all goes away.”

Yet Oxitec’s first
Aedes aegypti
field test, in the Cayman Islands 360 miles south of Florida, had been hugely controversial. The precursor to trials in Malaysia and Brazil and planned trials in Panama, India, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, in addition to Key West, it began with local scientists manually separating male and female larvae by size—the females are bigger—using what one called “a sieve-like method.” They achieved 99.55 percent accuracy, and three million OX513As were released in a forty-acre area. Another way to say that is that one-half of 1 percent of those released, nearly fifteen thousand mosquitoes, were genetically modified females capable of biting local islanders who had little knowledge about the experiment. But the results, published in late 2011, were impressive: After six months, the number of wild
Aedes aegypti
was reduced by 80 percent—“a complete success,” proclaimed Alphey at a meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, where he first announced the tests to a surprised world. (A later test, in Brazil’s Bahia state, would reduce the wild population by 96 percent.)

In the limited public outreach by Cayman Islands authorities before the trials—leaflets, a five-minute promotional spot on local television—there was no mention of genetic modification. The mosquitoes were repeatedly described as “sterile males,” language Alphey himself used until criticized for it. “If a female mates with a sterile male,” read a 2010 joint press release from Oxitec and Caymans scientists, “she will have no offspring, thus reducing the next generation’s population.” Researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Germany’s Max Planck Institute soon studied Oxitec’s papers and regulatory filings and pointed out an issue that was more than semantic: In the lab, nearly 3.5 percent of the larvae born to a modded male and wild female somehow survived, even without tetracycline. Nearly 3.5 percent of 100 million mosquitoes is a big number. “There is the plausible concern,” they wrote, “that females could inject tTA—the fusion of
E. coli
and herpes DNA—“into humans.”

Alphey readily conceded one worry expressed by critics: If
Aedes aegypti
is wiped out, might not
Aedes albopictus,
the Asian tiger mosquito, come fill its ecological niche? “In places where you’ve got both,” he said, “you’ve got to assume that by eliminating this one, you expand the other one a little bit. But
albopictus
is just a much less effective dengue vector.” In some cases, he suggested, Oxitec’s campaign against
aegypti
could happily morph into a campaign against
albopictus
—a kind of entomological Forever War. Oxitec’s first RIDL prototype, OX3688, had in fact been a strain of
albopictus
developed as that mosquito expanded across the U.S. market. It was now in the “product optimisation” phase.

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ONE PROMINENT SUPPORTER
of GM mosquitoes is the $33.5 billion Gates Foundation, the world’s largest charitable organization, which shares its founder’s focus on techno-fixes. In his 2012 annual letter, Bill Gates declared that “innovation is the key” but noted a structural problem: If profit is the motive, third world problems rarely receive first world solutions. “The private market does a great job of innovating in many areas,” he wrote, “particularly for people who have money. The focus of Melinda’s and my foundation is to encourage innovation in the areas where there is less profit opportunity but where the impact for those in need is very high.”

The Gates Foundation is so big that it can seem to single-handedly dictate global aid priorities, and two of its favorite causes are mosquito-borne illnesses and agriculture. In 2005, it gave a $19.7 million grant to a mosquito-modding consortium that included Oxitec and a number of public universities. (The money went toward open-source mosquito varieties, not OX513A.) The foundation also gave $13 million to a group in Asia and Australia trying to infect
Aedes
with a dengue-zapping bacteria, $62 million to the long-stalled international Dengue Vaccine Initiative, and half a billion dollars and counting to a partnership with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to hasten a long-awaited malaria vaccine that had been neglected—like many candidates for a dengue vaccine—because there had been little profit in a disease of the tropical poor. Like dengue, malaria was on a global expansion. “I think it’s fair to say that all of us in the global health community are aware of the potential impact of global warming,” says Dr. Rip Ballou of the Gates Foundation and formerly GSK and the vaccine’s champion for thirty years, “especially so when it comes to diseases transmitted by vectors.”

In agriculture, the equivalent of the GSK partnership was the Gates Foundation’s collaboration with Monsanto—the emerging leader in the race for climate-ready crops and, like GSK, a publicly traded company that couldn’t otherwise justify products meant for people who couldn’t afford them. Monsanto has revenues of $11 billion a year, and its stock is held by everyone from Deutsche Bank’s climate funds to the Gates Foundation itself. It was a subcontractor for the Gates-funded African Agricultural Technology Foundation, which had received $40 million to develop drought-tolerant corn for five sub-Saharan countries. In 2009, the continent’s first varieties were tested under the South African sun. Just after Christmas two years later, Monsanto’s MON 87460—also a genetically modified, drought-resistant variety of maize—was quietly deregulated for use in Iowa, Indiana, and Nebraska. It came with a catch: The USDA had found it scarcely more drought tolerant than existing breeds. “Equally comparable varieties produced through conventional breeding techniques are readily available,” read the environmental assessment.

Since 2008, anti-GM activists have tracked preparations for global warming by Monsanto and what they call the five other “Gene Giants”: BASF, DuPont, Bayer, Dow, and Syngenta, the latter the alma mater of numerous senior Oxitec employees. The activists have identified at least 2,195 patent filings related to “abiotic stress tolerance”—resistance to extreme temperatures, resistance to droughts, resistance to anything in the environment that is not living but not friendly.

Dominating the climate-patent race were Monsanto and BASF, partners since 2007 in “the biggest joint biotech R&D program on record”—an eventually $2.5 billion effort to develop stress-tolerant corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and canola. Monsanto long ago shed its business as a manufacturer of chemicals—Phos-Chek for fires, Agent Orange for forests, DDT for insects—in the decades following a breakthrough: In 1982, its scientists were the first in the world to genetically modify a plant cell. But the patents upon which an empire was built—for the weed killer Roundup and for crops resistant to it—were beginning to expire. Monsanto needed another breakthrough. It was trying to reinvent itself. “How can we squeeze more food from a raindrop?” asked the Monsanto ad that appeared prominently in
The
New Yorker,
The
Atlantic,
and
National Geographic
. When Monsanto and BASF identified a useful gene sequence in one plant, they often filed for a patent on it that applied to multiple plants. One issued to BASF in late 2009 is representative. “We claim . . . a transgenic plant cell transformed with an isolated polynucleotide,” begins U.S. patent 7,619,137. The plant cell was found in any of the following: “maize, wheat, rye, oat, triticale, rice, barley, soybean, peanut, cotton, rapeseed, canola,
manihot,
pepper, sunflower, tagetes, potato, tobacco, eggplant, tomato,
Vicia
species, pea, alfalfa, coffee, cacao, tea,
Salix
species, oil palm, coconut, perennial grasses, and a forage crop plant.”

“The more we know about the biology of the plant,” Monsanto spokesperson Sara Duncan told me, “the more we pave the way for future advances.” For biotech companies, the field of genomics—sequencing an organism’s full DNA—provided a kind of real estate map. Rice was the first cereal crop and second plant overall to be sequenced, in 2005, five years after a rough draft of the human genome was assembled. It is relatively simple, a Rosetta stone for crop genomes, and lessons learned here can be applied to more lucrative corn and wheat. This is why three-quarters of it was already named in U.S. patent applications as of 2006. And why in the BASF-Monsanto collaboration that was becoming a climate-ready juggernaut, rice was the model crop.

Out of more than thirty-five hundred mosquito species, the second to have its genome decoded was
Aedes aegypti
. The first, in 2002, was
Anopheles gambiae,
one of sub-Saharan Africa’s deadliest carriers of malaria and an important target of the Gates Foundation. After a researcher discovered that
Anopheles gambiae
is attracted to foul odors, the world’s richest foundation once spent $775,000 to test traps that smelled like human feet and Limburger cheese. The Gates Foundation has notably spent not a penny on helping the world cut carbon emissions. “We believe the best way for the foundation to address climate change is to help poor farmers adapt,” read an overview of its agricultural strategy. A stalk of GM rice seems nothing like a seawall, but to a technocrat it is the same—another patch, another software update for a world increasingly programmed by us.