Get the Mosquitoes!

John Whitfield

  • Genes in Conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements by Austin Burt and Robert Trivers
    Harvard, 602 pp, £21.95, January 2006, ISBN 0 674 01713 7

Some flour beetles carry a gene called Medea. Their offspring look normal as larvae but, around the time of hatching, half the females become listless, then paralysed; and then they die. No one knows how it works, but the female offspring that inherit a copy of the gene are protected from the poison it uses, while those that don’t are killed by it.

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