Bill Gates donated $4 million to create killer mosquitoes

Bill Gates, one of the founders of Microsoft, is investing four million dollars in a project to create mosquitoes that will kill each other through mating. This is a bold step towards defeating malaria, a deadly disease that mosquitoes carry through a bite.

Gates uses funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest charitable foundation in the world. The project will create genetically modified male mosquitoes that will mate with females in the wild and transmit a gene that kills the next generation.

When the females give offspring, because of the gene transmitted by the fathers, it will not live to adulthood. And only adult mosquitoes bite people. This means that such a solution will probably stop the spread of malaria through mosquito bites.

The project will be implemented by the British biotech company Oxitec, which has already created genetically modified mosquitoes to fight the Zika virus. In some areas, the population of the yellow-horned mosquito (a type of insect that carries the virus) has decreased by 90 percent.

But malaria mosquitoes require a different breed of genetically modified males to mate, which will be ready for testing in 2020.