The malaria-fighting community is an inventive—if eccentric—group of people. To spend all day, every day, relentlessly focused on eliminating a tiny bug (regardless of the fact that this tiny bug has enormous capacity for harm) is, by definition, to be a little bit crazy.
So it follows that the introduction of mad scientists into our happy clan was, in many ways, inevitable.
A fantastic article in the Wall Street Journal tells the story of Dr. Wood and Dr. Kare, two astrophysicists who once worked on President Reagan’s Star Wars project, and who are now working on a new way to fight malaria-carrying mosquitoes…with lasers:
…researchers in long white coats recently stood watching a small glass box of bugs. Every few seconds, a contraption 100 feet away shot a beam that hit the buzzing mosquitoes, one by one, with a spot of red light. The insects survived this particular test, which used a non-lethal laser. But if these researchers have their way, the Cold War missile-defense strategy will be reborn as a WMD: Weapon of Mosquito Destruction…
Fighting malaria with laser beams. Welcome to the Final Frontier.
Tags: malaria no more, lasers
