UC Davis

This dissertation is based on five years of fieldwork with the UC Davis Vector Genetics Laboratory in Davis California. Following particularly their collaboration with a University of California consortium project led by UC Irvine, it is focused on the laboratory’s contribution to the project of creating the first open-field trial of genetically modified organisms bearing gene drives, a genetic element which alters patterns of genetic inheritance. These organisms are a version of the Anopheles gambiae mosquito, which is the main African vector of malaria. That disease continues to kill nearly half a million people on that continent every year, most of them children. Even with the very recent introduction of a possible vaccine, with only about 30% effectiveness, the project is premised on the conclusion that existing prevention and treatment efforts are, and will continue to be, inadequate. The research team believes that this project, if it progresses to implementation on continental Africa, has the potential to eliminate malaria. The Vector Genetics Laboratory has been tasked with undertaking the fieldwork portion of this project, or bringing organisms and phenomena demonstrated in the laboratory to fruition in the world. This text highlights a simple point which has nevertheless been neglected in most conversations around gene drives and similar genetic engineering projects. The trial, like some others using similar technologies, depends on the manipulation of existing populations and their reproductive networks. This new mode of controlling living organisms is offered as a more elegant and effective way to change other living beings in the world. Rather than doing things to them, we have them do them to each other. Gene drives are perhaps the clearest example of this strategy, and it is widely recognized that this opens up new possibilities for the manipulation of living beings. I argue here, however, that this strategy also re-theorizes ideas of control in practice, and scrambles existing discourses about novelty and change through what it does to sexual reproduction. While we tend to think of the new mosquito as the novel element of the equation, my fieldwork shows that it does not figure centrally in the planning of an open field trial. That is because it is not very likely to do a new or unexpected thing all on its own. The crux of this new technology is that it intervenes at the point of reproduction—the space where the researchers anticipate they may be surprised, where something unpredictable may happen, is at this sexual interface between laboratory mosquito and wild-type. Because they know a great deal about the former, but very little about the latter, it is in the wild half of this equation that attention is centered. This matters for the kinds of stories we are building around this and other projects using gene drives. Because this is likely to be the first use of the technology outside the laboratory, its outcome carries tremendous consequences for future uses, both planned and as-yet unimagined. I argue that implementation, far from being after-the-fact, is actually the main event. The project is not the mosquito; it is what the mosquito can do with the world. Investigations of mosquito worlds, thus, take on a new and greater significance: they are not the passive ground upon which change is enacted, but active doers catalyzed in a particular way by sex.