One scientist’s radical idea to engineer mice and stop Lyme disease
Although most people associate deer with Lyme disease the chain of transmission actually begins when an adolescent tick bites a white-footed mouse carrying Lyme bacteria. It makes sense then that if you were to eliminate Lyme from mice that a huge part of your problem would be solved. And that is the idea behind Kevin Esvelt’s “Mice Against Ticks” campaign. Esvelt, who specializes in a field called evolutionary and ecological engineering at MIT Media Lab, wants to “heritably immunize the local white-footed mice.”1He says, “The idea is fewer infected ticks means fewer infected kids.”2 “The nasty bacterial infection can...
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