“No flies means no chocolate - it’s as simple as that”

CATHERINE HILL SPENT nearly 20 years attempting to research new ways to kill mosquitoes before she had what she calls an “epiphany”.

With their famished whines, irritating bites and potentially deadly conveyance of disease, it’s hard to find a sympathetic view of mosquitoes. But Hill, an entomologist at Purdue University in Indiana, felt a pang of regret as she and her colleagues sought to develop genetic modifications that would extinguish certain species.

“I just thought, ‘Morally I’m not okay with this anymore’,” says Hill. On a superficial level, she had lost any revulsion towards mosquitoes after spending years looking at them under a microscope – on close inspection they were beautiful.

But her more fundamental concerns were around the implications of wiping them off the face of the Earth. What would happen, ecologically, if they were wrenched from the environment? Which animals, such as birds and fish, would suffer if mosquitoes were taken from their diet? Should we really be developing new synthetic insecticides that kill mosquitoes along with a host of other species too?

“It occurred to me that in the past 100 years all we’ve thought about is how to kill mosquitoes