Blood stains the walls of the cage where the deadly creatures are kept. They look agitated and eager to escape, but they’ve just been fed, and David O’Brochta figures it’s safe to stick his hand inside. Normally they would bite. Especially if you’re a person. Put yourself in a room full of cows, and these things will single you out, O’Brochta says.

Not on this day, however, and not in this new University of Maryland biotech laboratory in the US. At the moment, the hundreds of captive Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes, the kind that most often infect people with deadly malaria parasites, are not hungry. But they will be soon. And that will never change. So O’Brochta, head of the lab’s new Insect Transformation Facility, is trying to change something else about Anopheles gambiae to prevent it from claiming a million lives a year.

O’Brochta creates mutant insects. Not the kind in the horror movies that grow 30 ft tall and menace the city. He’s trying to create the kind whose genes have been tweaked just enough, in just the right way, that the insect’s bad habits are made benign. Just enough so it can’t harbour the parasite.

That is not easy: Anopheles gambiae is about as small as an eyelash. Hundreds of its minute, gray, banana-shaped eggs resemble a pinch of gunpowder. But the state-of-the art lab, which debuted last month, is designed for the microscopic tasks of gene-tweaking. Injections into mosquito eggs are done with a quartz glass needle the size of a strand of hair.

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