“We’re building a bug,” in much the way inventors would design a new airplane, says O’Brochta, 51, an insect molecular geneticist. “We know we can do it.” The new lab, the only one of its kind in the world, has been designed to perfect the process.

The lab has an insectary where mosquitoes such as Anopheles gambiae and Aedes aegypti are reared in warm, humid chambers that look like walk-in freezers. They feed on mice.

Female mosquitoes—the ones that bite—require “blood meals” every few days to nourish their eggs, and it is their excretions that stain the plastic buckets in which they are kept. None of the feeding mosquitoes is infected with pathogens that cause disease, he says. But Anopheles remains a “flying syringe,” O’Brochta says, and a superb vector for Plasmodium falciparum, the deadliest form of the parasite that causes malaria.

The mosquito picks up the parasite by biting an infected person. The parasite mates and produces offspring that are deposited in the next person the insect bites. The insect’s taste for people is baffling. “They smell us,” O’Brochta says. “They specialise on us.” It is unclear why.

But the cycle is devastating. Malaria is believed to have killed more people than wars and other illnesses combined. Although drugs to combat the disease exist, economics and politics, along with drug and insecticide resistance, have hampered the fight, O’Brochta says. There is no malaria vaccine, he says. Scientists at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Maryland, and scores of their colleagues elsewhere are seeking to develop one.

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