Articles

Behind an unmarked door at the side of an anonymous second world war Nissen hut in the middle of Oxfordshire, a group of scientists are attending to the needs of hundreds of thousands of mosquitoes. They provide horse blood for the females to feed on, moist beds for them to lay their eggs, and add genes that transform the mosquitoes into what could be the most decisive tool yet invented to combat mosquito-borne disease. The mosquitoes developed and raised here at the laboratories of Oxitec, a British biotech company based near Didcot, have already infiltrated wild populations in Brazil, Malaysia and the Cayman Islands, and will soon be unleashed in Panama and India.