Mosquito laser.

[planters]

I get your point and do understand that I am not accusing Mr. Gates of being ill intentioned, nefarious or ungenerous. I think his resources are being wasted here. The numbers just don't work and good intentions won't make them work.

I am not minimizing the importance of this issue and it is why I have a beef with Rachael Carson. I haven't thought about this problem hard enough and long enough, but if I had the resources my money would be on very sophisticated pesticides or genetic engineering. DDT was invented 140 years ago. That's 50 years before penicillin. Modern antibiotics have advanced a lot in efficacy and safety and self destructing or highly photosensitive pesticides might be one alternative. The human genome project has made DNA analysis an automated, tabletop affair. With a complete map of the mosquito's genetic code implanting a gene that made malaria deadly to the mosquito as well as humans might be a selective approach.

An interesting fact is that people that carry the recessive gene for sickle cell anemia (called sickle cell trait) do not suffer from the deadly sickle cell disease. You have to get the gene from both parents to express the gene, then you get the disease. Sickle cell trait causes the red blood cells to be immune to the malaria parasite and so in populations that surround the Mediterranean it is a survival advantage to carry the sickle cell gene even if you run the risk that you will marry another carrier. Malaria is a worse threat than sickle cell disease.

[lightlinked]

and that race to patent the human genome?
open source glowing plant made with genetic engineering? a bold new era
http://www.glowingplant.com/

Giving away free mosquito nets is deemed more effective
http://www.wired.com/2012/12/why-the...cing-entities/
ideas are meant to be free

[Draco]

they eye safety not included, i did build a system to target a neighbor of mine that i was friends with, it used a free ware version of a sentry paint ball target tracking system, i omitted the paint ball gun for a dpss laser head and instead of a galvo it moved the laser head it's self and had a rather large coverage area, it was slow but still worked, On mine the camera was the stationary part. Proof of concept works but i do agree that the cost and hazards of something like this are a large problem, making a bait station and then killing the bugs at that point i think would be more effective

I do not believe the fix for this should be with chemicals, i hope i won't need to go in to the problems DDT caused,

[planters]

Lightlinked,
Thanks for the links. I wish there were comments attached to the Intellectual Ventures article. It comes across like a press release and I suspect there are two very valid sides to this issue. There have been issues with patent trolls through the years whose actions have inhibited innovation by taking away the benefit to an inventor or maybe more accurately the developer of an invention. This is a hot topic. Kinda funny if Mr. Gates, founder of the very aggressive, patent player, Microsoft has a hand in this?

Draco,
As a bit of a chemist, I see chemicals as molecular sized machines. If one solution was to manufacture mosquito scale drones to devour the insects and that returned as necessary to a small recharging station in the back of a pickup truck parked near the lake, I think this would be OK. If those drones became so small and cheap that they were disposable (release and forget), I think this would be OK as well. I see designer chemicals as a progression of this trend.
DDT is a very simple molecule, synthesized when steam power was the primary mover and the telegraph was the internet. Despite the uproar surrounding the controversial, 1962 book, Silent Spring, DDT was not introduced as recently as the 1960s or even when it was used during WW2 to prevent typhus and malaria. If we care, and I believe Bill Gates actually does then a few billion to advance the software that helps chemists to design and virtually test and modify new chemical systems may have far broader benefits to society as a whole than just the development of pico-scale (chemical scale) molecular "terminators". I think this would be more than just OK.

[mixedgas]

Targeting the Anopheles mosquitoe is difficult. It does not breed just in ponds. It will breed wherever a small patch of water exists, in a leaf for example.

And Yes, I did work around the edges of a laser based Malaria reduction project:

Only its one more likely to work. It uses a hand crank generator or batteries to power a small diode laser. The polarized laser light at the right wavelength is scattered off a blood sample in a cuvette. The cuvette is mounted between a quad of powerful magnets with a field shaping structure. As the magnets rotate, they spin the phase of the hemazoin particles left over in the blood, if its infected. That ever so slight slightly rotates the polarization of the laser light scatter, which is detectable if you have hundreds of detection cycles. A small DSP signal processing board extracts the signal.

So you can easily detect the human carriers of the disease right before their symptoms start to appear. You then medicate them to suppress the breeding activities of the parasite. So they have then have a productive month of life instead of possibly laying around helpless for two weeks to a month.

As it stands, there is no treatment for the disease, right now you get it for life if infected. There are medications to prevent it from infecting a healthy person, although some of these have nasty mental health side effects in many individuals. There are medications to suppress the infection when it flares up in a infected person. Those only work if you catch the flare-up early enough.

Three nights a week for months I walked across campus from my day job to volunteer on the hardware for that project in the evenings. I lowered the detection threshold on the prototype considerably, and found them a source of very low cost, very high grade polarization cubes. I then helped part of the team write a draft business plan. Its in field test now and quite a few groups have picked up the concept. It has some big sponsors, so it has a likely chance of succeeding.

Costs of the unit will be under 250$. Most of that goes to the very high strength permanent magnets, strain free plastic cuvettes, reinforced optical rail, and the highly stabilized diode driver.

Previously the only way to determine early stages of an recurring attack was a six hour long microscope based process.

My dad was infected with Malaria in the war. This WAS personal. I hate that %$#@ parasite.


Steve

[Draco]

Planters, I would support something like that , that is targeted to one thing, just the blanket solutions that kill every thing like DDT did and then the side effects in other animals was DDT's largest flaw, it was a great chemical until it was over used.

Mixedgas, I never know that was possible, i am still trying to wrap my brain around that one. That is really cool