The Atlantic

The Decades-Long Quest to Make Virus-Proof Mosquitoes

A bacterium called <em>Wolbachia</em> could stop the bloodsucking insects from spreading diseases like Zika and dengue fever.
Source: Pilar Olivares / Reuters

In the summer of 1922, as Simeon Burt Wolbach and Marshall Hertig slid their scalpels into 13 common house mosquitoes, they had no idea that they were about to stumble across one of the most successful microbes on the planet, nor that a

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