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The lively ethics of global health GMOs: The case of the Oxitec mosquito

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Abstract

Social scientists have recently brought renewed attention to the relationship between epidemics and environmental change. Vector-borne and zoonotic diseases (for example, dengue, malaria, avian influenza) are exacerbated by disturbances to the environment, yet historically most solutions to these problems tend to involve further disturbances to environments, notably the mass destruction of non-human life (for example, pigs, sheep, cattle and insects). This article analyzes ethical debates that arose in 2010, when the British biotechnology firm Oxitec Ltd. announced a field test of a technology that would change this story: a genetically modified (GM) version of the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits dengue. Designed to control mosquito populations through interbreeding, Oxitec’s mosquitoes are an example of what I call ‘global health Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)’. As both environmental interventions, like GM crops, and biomedical technologies, like pharmaceuticals, such organisms challenge not only the moral position of social scientists vis–à–vis vector-borne or zoonotic disease but also the relationship of environmental ethics to bioethics. Addressing these challenges alongside the abiding question of for-profit biotechnology’s role in global health, I suggest that global health GMOs might be assessed through a ‘lively ethics’ that emerges not in discrete regulatory spaces (‘body’, ‘nation-state’, ‘global environment’) but in more fluid ‘moral spaces’.

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Notes

  1. I am thinking here of classical and contemporary anthropological work: on healing (Kleinman, 1973 and Mol, 2002); kinship and reproduction (Levi-Strauss, 1969; Rubin, 1975; Roberts, 2012); and exchange (Mauss, 1967 and Nadasdy, 2007).

  2. This interface has been described with the terms “biocapital”, “biosociality” and “lively capital” (Rabinow and Rose, 2006; Sunder Rajan, 2006; Sunder Rajan, 2012). For a thorough review, see Helmreich (2008).

  3. By attending to the historical process by which DDT supplanted older, more socially integrative forms of mosquito control in Argentina, mingling “pure ecology” and “social ecology”, Carter (2012) complicates the DDT versus environment narrative.

  4. As Kinkela (2011) points out, self-proclaimed humanitarians continue to champion DDT as a public health tool, albeit undergirded by a neoliberal ideology that paints Carson and other environmentalists as extremists bent not on saving people or nature but on destroying the free market (p. 183). For an example of this line of reasoning, see Roberts and Tren (2010).

  5. For example, the Consumers Association of Penang (CAP/SAM, 2010) cited the risk of disturbance of the ecological niche filled by Aedes aegypti. The use of ‘niche’ language suggests that even pests fit into a wider, inherently delicate order (see also Wallace, 2013).

  6. GMOs, particularly chimeric viruses and transgenic mice, have played a well-documented role in biomedical research for the past two decades (Fujimura, 1996; Haraway, 1997; Davies, 2012). The role of GMOs in health has recently expanded, as funders, particularly the Gates Foundation, have mobilized resources for the development of GMOs with applications for global health problems. Oxitec’s project is one of a suite of mosquito-related dengue interventions currently underway at the laboratory, control trial or field trial stage, and transgenic organisms are now in development for use against avian influenza and malaria (Beisel and Boëte, 2013). In addition to Oxitec’s mosquitoes, Sanofi-Pasteur, the vaccine wing of the French pharmaceutical firm Sanofi-Aventis, and Inviragen, a US-based company, have conducted advanced trials of transgenic dengue vaccines, thanks to the support of the Dengue Vaccine Initiative, a product development partnership also supported by the Gates Foundation. There has been no concerted opposition, inside or outside the community of dengue scientists, to the work of Sanofi-Pasteur or Inviragen. Nevertheless, these vaccines and Oxitec’s mosquitoes are among the first living GMOs with global health applications to be deployed outside the laboratory against emerging epidemics.

  7. Perhaps the most notable of these critiques comes from the international opposition to GM crops. In 2013, Mark Lynas, a former anti-GMO activist with Earth First, made international headlines by recanting his opposition to GM crops, calling his former anti-GMO advocacy “anti-science” (Stone, 2002; Herring, 2008; Lynas, 2013). “Science”, according to Lynas, had shown that GMOs were both safe and useful in the fight against world hunger.

  8. Again, this is nothing new. See, for example, Sunder Rajan (2006) and Helmreich (2008).

  9. In principle, both Alphey and Reeves count themselves as supporters. Reeves et al (2012) have argued for a more robust and transparent regulation of any proposed releases, which implies that they do see them as theoretically feasible, ethical and desirable.

  10. What Hedgecoe (2004) calls “critical bioethics” also calls attention to the conditions under which bodies and subjects of ethical decision making come into being (see also Twine, 2005).

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Acknowledgements

The research for this article was supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award; the Social Science Research Council; the National Science Foundation (Grant # 0849650); the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and Franklin & Marshall College. The author presented versions of this article at the “Beyond Biosocialities” workshop at the University of Amsterdam in January 2013 and at the BioProperty Workshop at Oxford University in December 2013. The author would like to thank the participants in those workshops, especially Sherine Hamdy, Ann Kelly, Christiaan de Koning, Javier Lezaun, Julie Livingston, Rob Lorway, Vinh Kim Nguyen, Natalie Porter, N’Amah Razon, Rene Umlauf and Sjaak van der Geest, for their comments and encouragement. The author is grateful to Sarah Besky for her editorial eye and her insights on the agricultural dimensions of GMO ethics, and to Frédéric Keck for providing a critical read of the material. Finally, the author would also like to thank the BioSocieties editors and four anonymous reviewers for their constructive commentaries and suggestions. Any errors, however, are the author’s own. The study on which the research is based has been subjected to appropriate ethical review. The author has no competing interests.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, Franklin & Marshall College, PO Box 3003, Lancaster, 17604–3003, PA, USA

    Alex M Nading

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Nading, A. The lively ethics of global health GMOs: The case of the Oxitec mosquito. BioSocieties 10, 24–47 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2014.16

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