As spring emerged on this island of manicured estates and idyllic beaches, a group of scientists from the Boston area arrived on a recent afternoon with an extraordinary request for local officials: Let us release hordes of genetically altered mice into the wild. Hundreds of thousands of them, potentially.
The engineered rodents would look exactly like the native white-footed mice. But each of their cells would carry genetic code, specially tailored in an MIT lab, for resistance to the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. White-footed mice are a key reservoir for the harmful bacteria.
If fewer mice carry Lyme, the scientists say, fewer ticks that bite them would become infected. That, in turn, would mean fewer ticks that bite humans would carry Lyme, which is becoming more prevalent throughout New England as a warming climate allows more ticks to survive winter.
“With so many people suffering from Lyme every single day, which is an awful disease, we need a solution urgently,” said Joanna Buchthal, research director of the MIT Media Lab’s Mice Against Ticks project, who has close friends who suffer from Lyme and other tick-borne diseases. “This offers a real, if revolutionary, way to tackle the problem.”
