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Friday, March 19, 2010

Insects as vaccines

My personal impressions of and interactions with bugs have almost always been negative, but the reasons for this unfortunate nature of our relationship are not limited to general squeamishness and fear on my part. At least that's what I'm gleaning from Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War by Jeffrey Lockwood, my thesis chair.

I have far yet to go in the book, but already Lockwood's case is sensitizing me to the ways in which insects and the minor or major pestilences they carry with them have captured human imagination from ancient times until now. In a section exploring the role of insects in Old Testament history and theology, Lockwood notes that Yawheh was "perceived as an entomologically astute deity" and that what he needed "was nature's arsenal--blights that aroused a deep sense of mystery and fear. Winning a war by 'shock and awe' would render a conquered foe psychologically beaten and culturally disheartened" (11). Lockwood goes on to detail the prominent role of insects in the plagues that are recorded to have come upon the land of Egypt in the story of the Exodus. Six of the ten plagues, he argues, employed insects (ranging from gnats to flies to locusts) as combatants.

So my dislike of these critters is not unique. I am drawing on full-bodied cultural memory when I slap at mosquitoes, when I gag in panic after breathing in a cloud of gnats during a summer jog by the river, when I can't concentrate or sleep after seeing a spider (I know, not an insect technically, but still) in my room and then losing track of it by the time I return from the bathroom with a tissue or two (or three, to cushion the awful crunch of my intended killing).

But there are other ways to think about bugs, to think about them in more positive terms. On an emotional level, stories like Charlotte's Web remind me of their valuable place in the biological world--and that most of them, individually, really aren't as sinister, as bent on my destruction or disease, as I imagine them to be.

On a whole different level, what if we think about them not as the messengers of pestilence but as a means of promoting health? That seems to be what a researcher from a university in Japan is up to, according to CNN. He led a project that has successfully altered a certain species of mosquito so that it carries a vaccination for malaria within its saliva rather than the disease itself. At least in lab mice, the mosquito's bites resulted in a transfer of the vaccine to the host. Wow.

But given our sensitive relationship to the insect world, are we prepared for such switches of perspective? Apparently the researchers "admit that there are barriers to using this form of vaccination in the wild, including issues of controlling dosage, 'medical safety issues' and the 'issues of public acceptance to [the] release of transgenic mosquitoes.'"

2 comments:

Mary Anne Posnanski said...

Evie,
I heard the most wonderful story on NPR about this man who was incapacitated by his allergies, ashtma, etc. He discovered that people in this area of Africa did not have allergies. The reason: they had tapeworms. Research has been going on in the U.S. about it. The man could not find a source to get tapeworms here. He went to Africa, got himself infected...and is cured. The researchers surmise that we Americans probably carried many more bugs and parasites, etc., than we do today in our ultra-clean culture. So,yes, bugs can be very good.

Evie Hemphill said...

Wow ... still not sure I'd trade allergies for tapeworms, though!