America Is Missing Out on the Ultimate Mosquito Weapon - The Atlantic

The announcement of the new “air defense” system was issued from Changzhou. A company called Photon Matrix Lab claimed to have developed a new technology for identifying and eliminating deadly threats mid-flight. A video on Indiegogo showed potential buyers how it works: After detecting a mosquito, the device fires off what looks like a blue-violet lightning bolt. When struck, the insect does not just fall straight down, no—it is more satisfying than that: Its body somersaults and tumbles out of the frame, bringing its career of vampiric air raids to a sudden end.<br>Photon Matrix Lab had my attention. Under normal circumstances, a mosquito lives for just a few weeks, and in that time, its wings will carry it a few miles or so, at most, from the pond or puddle of its birth—but for some reason, I am almost always within range of one. The bugs seem to have a primal knowledge of my whereabouts, and a craving for my blood that goes beyond mere thirst. In a span of minutes, they will perforate my skin 10 times with the dirty needles that protrude from their faces, and each micropuncture will swell up into an insomnia-inducing welt the size of a silver dollar.<br>We are a secret society, those of us who attract this torment. When we meet one another at a barbecue, we bond over our shared longing for the mosquito’s extinction. On behalf of my fellow victims, I decided to look into this new laser to see whether it might really deliver us from misery. I reached out to Photon Matrix Lab to arrange a call.<br>The mosquito-killing laser was not invented in China. It’s as American as the Model T or the Colt Revolver. Lowell Wood, an astrophysicist who was the architect of President Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars missile-defense system, first proposed the idea in 2006. He’d been invited to a brainstorm convened by Nathan Myhrvold, a polymath inventor. Myhrvold had served as chief technology officer at Microsoft before founding his own company, Intellectual Ventures, and had remained good friends with Bill Gates, who asked him to look into new technologies that might help prevent malaria.<br>Myhrvold, now 66 and still the CEO of Intellectual Ventures, is jolly and excitable in conversation. On a video call, he told me that he was immediately drawn to the idea of developing the laser system that Wood had proposed. Myhrvold thought the weapon could be safely used, because mosquitoes are so tiny. He marveled at their paltry biomass: “There’s maybe 450,000 of them or 500,000 of them in a pound—whatever it is, that’s a shitload of mosquitoes,” he said. (In fact, there are about 180,000 mosquitoes in a pound.) Killing just one wouldn’t require that much beamed energy, which meant the laser could be fired around people, dogs, and cats.<br>Read: Notes of a mosquito hunter<br>At the time, Gates was in his mosquito-net era, having come to realize that the insects are the most dangerous animals on Earth. The diseases they carry kill more of us on an annual basis than snakes, crocodiles, sharks, scorpions, polar bears, and all human murderers combined. The lethal nature of mosquitoes is ancient knowledge, encoded in some of our most sacred texts. In the Book of Exodus, the third deadly plague that God sends against Egypt is described as kinnim, a Hebrew word that is rendered in the King James Bible as “lice”—but which some early Greek translations seem to have taken to mean “mosquitoes.” A few thousand years later, mosquitoes remain a plague on six of Earth’s seven continents. In the tropics, the bugs will feast on human flesh year-round. In the summer, their range extends close to the poles. I have personally endured unholy swarms of them in the Siberian Arctic.<br>Myhrvold’s team built a prototype of a “laser turret,” and he showed it off onstage at a TED conference in 2010. He told me he thought that Disney theme parks, luxury resorts, and sports stadiums might be impressed and buy the turrets for their properties. If some big, early buyer could supply the team with enough revenue that it could keep working on the new technology, Myhrvold figured that it could be made affordable for hospitals and clinics in the developing world too. He also guessed that large farms might be among the early clients, so his team figured out what kind of laser it would take to kill a plague of locusts.<br>Or perhaps they’d try to tap the “Sharper Image market,” on the theory that the people who buy high-end gadgets are the same ones who might derive some thrills from zapping a mosquito. “At the very least, it could be an entertaining conversation piece for someone’s Fourth of July barbecue,” Myhrvold said. None of it panned out: “We had discussions with potential investors and clients, and we even got some term sheets, but the deals all fell by the wayside.”<br>The mosquito problem is only getting worse. In 1985, a breeding population of the black-and-white Aedes albopictus mosquito hitched a ride on a Japanese...