Daybreakers is a science-fiction vampire movie from 2009 directed by Michael and Peter Spierig. In a futuristic world, all human civilization turned into vampires and the world was run after sunset in darkness. The remaining humans who are active during daytime are so extinct making the food supply at a level no longer sustainable for the vampire population. As vampires deprived of adequate blood supply evolve into bat-like monsters with no conscience or memory, it became an everyday problem for the vampire world to find an alternate solution – else it meant extinction. Being a science-fiction movie, of course there is a genius scientist with his microscope working on this type of problem.
While every single remaining human is getting hunted down, the movie suggests a clever way to start a turnabout. (Spoiler Warning!) There is a way to transform a vampire back into a human. In addition to that, this human (who was once a vampire) carries a virus in blood to transform vampire into human.
This means that, starting with one human, vampires that attack will get infected and transform back into human and will be sacrificed to transform other vampires into humans. In the end, the winning population would be human.
Enough about movie spoilers. At Imperial College in London, scientists have successfully done a similar thing to create the first batch of mosquitoes (our little vampires) that will produce 95% male offspring, throwing away the evolutionary theory of naturally occurring 50-50 sex ratio.
According to the journal Nature Communications, this gene modification is to crash the Anopheles Gambiae mosquitoes population, who are the main carriers of malaria parasite. The researchers eliminated the DNA of the X chromosome in a sperm, so that no sperm can carry the female chromosome by inserting a DNA cutting enzyme called I-Ppol. With so few female offspring, simple math allows us to see that after few generations the malaria-carrying mosquito population will completely be wiped.
According to World Health Organization, it is estimated that 600,000 people die each year from malaria. If the laboratory result gets replicated in the wild, this will save 600,000 of human population by means of a perfectly self-sustainable and cheap method.
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