For those beleaguered islanders, Kevin Esvelt has an offer.

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Esvelt, an evolutionary biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wants permission to stop Lyme disease by genetically engineering white-footed mice to vaccinate them against Lyme. He’d start by injecting captive mice with either a protein found on the Lyme bacteria, or one in the saliva of ticks. Some of those rodents would develop antibodies against these proteins, becoming immune. Esvelt would identify the genes that produce those antibodies and transfer them into the genomes of mice that haven’t encountered Lyme, using the gene-editing technique known as CRISPR.

In doing so, he’d create a lineage of rodents that would be naturally vaccinated against Lyme from birth. Any tick that bites them would fall off and die. Any Lyme bacterium that infiltrates their blood would be destroyed. Esvelt could then release these mice into the wild, where they would breed with free-ranging cousins and spread their immunity. He’d want to test this first on a small, uninhabited island. If it works, he could move on to Nantucket and neighbouring Martha’s Vineyard.

“Even beginning to do the work in the lab means you’re making a decision that could affect people out of a lab,” he says. “For gene drive, the closed-door model is morally unacceptable. You don’t have the right to go into your lab and build something that is ineluctably designed to affect entire ecosystems. If it escapes into the wild, it would be expected to spread and affect people’s lives in unknown ways. Doing that in secret denies people a voice.”

But no matter what he does, these drives still depend on CRISPR, and CRISPR depends on enzymes that come from bacteria. To make the drives work, Esvelt would need to add a few bacterial genes to the DNA of his engineered mice. And the citizens of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard weren’t comfortable with that. “They wanted the mice to be 100 percent mice,” Esvelt says.

“This work can only move forward if embraced by the community,” he says. “They are the ones in charge. It’s their environment.” So: no gene drive. He’ll simply let the engineered mice spread their anti-Lyme genes in the usual slow way.

Read the source article at The Atlantic

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