This amazing bit from the wikipedia article about the fly:

"The first, and to-date largest, documented infestation of C. hominivorax myiasis outside of the Americas occurred in North Africa from 1989 to 1991. The outbreak was traced to a herd of sheep in Libya's Tripoli region, which began suffering screwworm attacks in July 1989; over the following months, the myiasis spread rapidly, infecting numerous herds across a 25,000 km2 area. Eventually, the infested region spanned from the Mediterranean coast to the Sahara Desert, threatening the more than 2.7 million animals susceptible to C. hominvorax that inhabited the area. More than 14,000 cases of large-scale myiasis due to the C. hominivorax species were documented. Traditional control methods using veterinary assessment and treatment of individual animals were insufficient to contain the widely dispersed outbreak, so the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization launched a program based on the sterile insect technique.[10] About 1.26 billion sterile flies were produced in Mexico, shipped to the infested area, and released to mate with their wild counterparts. Within months, the C. hominvorax population collapsed; by April 1991, the program had succeeded in eradicating C. hominivorax in the Eastern Hemisphere. This effort, which cost under US$100 million, was among the most efficient and successful international animal health programs in UN history."

Incredible!

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochliomyia

A little tangential, but having just been in an argument here with someone who advocated a "nightwatchman state," I wonder what they'd think of the USDA's efforts here (as well as the other governments'). It seems almost impossible that this could have been coordinated by private industry alone: while there's an obvious benefit to the cattle industry, it seems hardly likely that they would have sponsored the years of investment in basic research that led to this, let alone successfully negotiated with Panama for the rights to dump irradiated bugs from coast to coast. Could it have been done?

It's also striking how much these efforts were made harder by US foreign policy and involvement in the wars of Central America, and are still made hard because of our poor relationship with Cuba.

There's significant cattle industry in South America too, and they still have screw worms. So private industry has not accomplished it there.

> US foreign policy in the wars

Cuba and the Soviet Union started insurgencies in several countries in Central America. Blaming the US for its attempts to counter this is disingenuous.

> ...it seems hardly likely that they would have sponsored the years of investment in basic research...

That is the easy part. There is a good model for shared infrastructure - a private corporation is established, all the local companies buy a share then the shared company builds, owns and operates the actual infrastructure. The same thing works for funding long-term research in everyone's best interest. A shared research corporation that all the local businesses can buy into. They can be guilted in to a small contribution and the research can happen at a slow-burn to generate results over time.

To me the bigger challenge is who would pay for dumping large numbers of irradiated bugs.

But this never happens?

I didn't come up with the idea, I saw it in action in a mining context.

Besides, how you can be sure it does or doesn't happen? The world is large and complicated; and basic research gets nearly no press and is very hard to statistically quantify. Where would you look for proof in the positive or negative?

Fonterra, New Zealand's largest company runs along these lines. It's a dairy company, so basically gets milk from dairy farmers and puts it on the market. It is a co-op owned by those farmers.

My guess is the mining companies do this more for liability then shared cost. I wonder what the churn is in this group of companies?

An example in semiconductors would be Sematech.

> Scientists now knew, from the horrific consequences of atomic bombs dropped on Japan, that high doses of radiation damage human tissue and cells. When a colleague introduced Knipling to research on the sterilization of other flies by radiation, he wondered: Could radiation sterilize screwworms too?

This is wrong, harmful effects of radiation on cells, that it causes mutations and makes things sterile, were known long before WW2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Joseph_Muller#Discover... They basically just put a lot of fruit flies under X-ray radiation and recorded the effects.

Well it's a classic journalistic technique. Put two statements adjacent to each other and imply a connection but actually you can see there is no formal conjunction.

I don't follow your logic.

The description "from the horrific consequences of atomic bombs dropped on Japan" is written and reads as nonessential, meaning it goes without saying but is nevertheless helpful in qualifying how "scientists now knew" within context of the article's chronological prose.

I understood the parent's remark as rejecting this factual inaccuracy.

There's not much logic in my statement just an understanding of what the journalist is trying to do: dramatize something quite ordinary.

They want to establish a historical context where Hiroshima was a recent event and somehow tie this highly dramatic event to the simple fact that scientists knew radiation damaged cells. But there is no particular connection between the two since scientists already knew that prior to Hiroshima.

So what's a hack to do? Well you write one sentence. Then you write another. You don't say "because". You just stick 'em close together. That way you get your cake (drama) and eat it too (can't be called out on a falsehood).

In this case your brain does the work for them and "joins" these two statements together. At which point if you know it's false you're aggrieved - and quite rightly because it is intended as a (mild) deception.

But it passes an editor because you can just say (waving hands) "well you know it was all happening around that time - I'm just filling in the general background..."

Great article. Wikipedia page is also interesting.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique

I was just reading about these drone dispersed little paper balls filled with parasitic wasp larva used to control corn borer. https://altigator.com/organic-agriculture-the-treatment-of-e...

I wonder what would happen if instead of releasing sterile male screwworms, we used the gene drive to release screwworms that could only have male descendants. I've heard of a similar idea to eradicate malaria by doing that to mosquitoes.

It seems that the mosquito effort was not a success after all [0].

[0] https://m.dw.com/en/genetically-modified-mosquitoes-breed-in...

Different approach, that attempt was to reduce population sizes not cause extinction. Though it is evidence that Gene Drive is less likely to work than many expect.

Nature thwarts gene drives by modifying their targets, so it's important that whatever is being targeted can't easily change. Surviving instead of being killed off is certainly an evolutionary advantage, after all :-)

There's been some research on finding targets that can't be mutated. Here's one example: https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.4245

While that may be true for general use of the gene drive, doesn't this particular use significantly increase the fitness of the individual organisms (despite being harmful to the species as a whole), resulting in essentially no evolutionary pressure against it?

Evolution happens on all levels at the same time. So, while this is the most likely result, it's not impossible that things go in other ways.

Anyway, it's also very unlikely that those actions result in anything worse than resistance against those same actions in the future.

The article says they are working on it: “Biologists are also developing a genetically modified male-only strain of screwworms, which would require fewer flies to be raised and released.”

That seems like they would still be doing the same thing, except that the flies they would be able to release 100% male flies instead of 50/50 males and females

Why don't we start with the thing that we know works, and worry about CRISPR magic later?

We started this a long time ago. It is "later".

The article does mention that...

I really had no idea the sterile-insect technique worked so well! One wonders, as was chewed over in a thread a few days ago, why it isn't already being used at scale to destroy invasive populations of malaria-bearing mosquitoes in sub-Saharan Africa.

Maybe mosquitos mate more than once, making this type of program much less effective.

Very long essay but very good. it is the same technique they tried to use for other diseases. Not sure why evolution cannot fight it - female that can detect sterile male survive.

I thought this would be about Carter and the guinea worm

Why would it be?

All he has to do is write one tweet: "Screwworms are the worst! No one likes them and with my powerful leadership we will destroy them even more!" Immediately lots of people will start campaigning to restore the pests to their previous range and the rest of the world too.

Why is it so important to fantasise imaginary scenarios about your idol-of-hate rather than conjure up effective means by which things can improve in society?

Derangement syndrome is a reality. Not everything bad that happens is a result of the scary orange puppet. A lot of times, its mass ignorance that causes the worst ills in society.

If you seek an "improvement in society", you might try reading more carefully. My comment was obviously making fun of the "deranged": to whit, people crazy enough to like screwworms. I have no opinions of the current president that don't extend to any other politician. They all like war, so I don't like any of them.

Have a nice day.

I don't remember Trump being mentioned in the original article, and it seems more like you had an opportunity to vent on your personal issue, so you went for it. Screwworm removal improved society; members of the hate-Trump cult don't.

Dude it was a joke. Read the thread: I didn't bring him up in the first place. You might find the world more agreeable if you were less intent on your impressions of other people's "personal issues". If you think I'm in a "hate cult" you have no idea what is going on.

This over-deep thread is why jokes are discouraged in HN comments.

It helps if they're funny. This one's just a mess all the way through.