Through the Wormhole

Humanity is under threat

from storms that seem to get fiercer...

Earthquakes that are ever more deadly...

And killer viruses that engulf the globe.

Are we powerless against these forces of nature?

Or is it time for us to fight back against planet Earth...

Tame the elements, harness limitless power,

eliminate entire species

and bring others back to life?

Do we dare to play god with our world?

Can we?

Should we...

Hack the planet?

Space, time, life itself.

The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.

captions paid for by discovery communications

we all know about hackers.

They hijack a system meant to do one thing

and make it do something different.

Usually, that means a computer.

But what if it was a planet?

Astronomers always say,

"Earth is the Goldilocks planet, ideal for life."

But we know Earth isn't perfect.

Living here means dealing with deadly natural forces

from plagues to drought to natural disasters.

And with global warming, things are getting worse.

Could we use technology to manipulate an entire world?

Hmm? Become hackers of planet Earth?

No place on the globe is safe from nature's onslaught.

Our coastlines are pounded by tsunamis,

hurricanes and cyclones.

The land we inhabit is riddled

with geological fault lines,

tormented by extremes of temperature.

But one natural enemy causes more human suffering

than all others combined.

And that enemy disguises itself

as a tiny flying insect.

Every year, mosquito-borne diseases kill more

than a million people.

There's malaria, yellow fever,

encephalitis and dengue fever.

Brazilian entymologist Guilherme Trivellato

knows this enemy personally.

He's a survivor of dengue.

It's the worst disease I ever had.

Put me in bed, all my bones were in pain.

My eyeballs were hurting a lot.

I don't want to have that again, never again.

But planet Earth has worse in store for us.

In his research outpost

in the Brazilian city of Piracicaba,

Guilherme is fighting mosquitoes

that are armed with a new weapon --

the zika virus.

Zika is coming.

And zika is a big menace for the whole city

and the whole country and even the whole world.

Even though a zika infection is usually mild,

this virus poses an enormous threat to humanity.

If it infects a pregnant woman,

the virus stunts the growth of her unborn child's brain,

causing a devastating condition called microcephaly.

Since zika can jump directly from human to human,

the virus has spread rapidly around the world,

a global threat to an entire generation.

More than 40% of the population of the world

is in contact with this mosquito.

And that's a huge problem.

To fight the massive threat posed by mosquitoes,

Guilherme and his team are doing something radical.

They're giving up on man-made weapons like insecticide.

Instead, they are hacking into nature itself,

designing and releasing

genetically modified mosquitoes into the wild,

letting nature fight nature.

It's quite weird,

the idea of releasing mosquitoes to have less mosquitoes.

But I think in this project that we are doing,

I have released something around 44 million mosquitoes already.

The way that we developed this method

is to use one mosquito against himself.

Instead of trying to kill mosquitoes with poisons,

Guilherme and his colleagues

at the biotech firm Oxitec are attacking them

with mosquitoes

which are genetically modified to die young

and to pass on that fatal trait

to the entire wild population.

Sex is our secret weapon in this case.

We changed the genome of this mosquito in the lab.

We released the male mosquito to seek for the female to copulate.

And when they do it, all the offspring will die

before they reach adult phase.

To a female mosquito, Guilherme's males look normal

and very suitable to breed with.

But they are stealth weapons,

carrying a genetic time bomb.

When the males are in the wild,

they mate with the females.

And all the offspring of this couple

will carry his father's genes.

The larvae die before he can bite someone,

before he can transmit the disease.

Creating a brand-new living organism

is not Guilherme's only god-like task.

If his mutant male mosquitoes are to spread

their premature death genes,

he has to keep them alive long enough to mate.

Imagine the bike Guilherme is riding

is a mosquito carrying the death gene.

And a flat tire is its fatal flaw.

Because it can't get far with a flat tire,

Guilherme uses a tire patch kit to keep it going.

That tire patch is an antibiotic called tetracycline,

which attaches to the death gene

and temporarily turns it off.

When we get tetracycline,

it's like we're filling up the tire of the bike.

And the mosquito can go long and reach the adult phase.

This antidote is good for just 14 days.

But that's long enough for the mosquito to mate.

Its offspring are not so lucky.

They have the death gene but no antidote.

In the wild, the offspring carrying the same gene

won't have the equipment to repair the tire.

And that's why they end up dying in the larval stage.

Get enough mutant mosquitoes out there,

and most of the next generation of disease-bearers

will be doomed to die.

After releasing mutant mosquitoes for a year,

Guilherme saw cases of dengue fever

in his neighborhood plummet from 133 to just 12.

Once we started to release, in 4 to 6 months,

we can see, like, a huge knockout on the population.

We don't hear about dengue fever anymore

in the area that we are treating.

It was once one of the most hot spots

for dengue fever in the city before we started the project.

Since the trial began before zika hit Brazil,

he can't compare its before and after numbers.

But the death gene method

is blind to which disease mosquitoes carry.

The results that we have for dengue fever,

we will certainly have the same results for zika virus.

Because we are killing the mosquito.

If you don't have the mosquito,

you don't have any of those diseases.

Hacking the genes of the mosquitoes

could save millions of human lives.

But hacking into the ecosystem,

even if to rid the world of devastating disease,

is not welcome by all the residents of Piracicaba.

Releasing into the wild genes that trigger death is,

for some, a shocking escalation of GMO technology.

We work with media and TV, radio, newspaper.

We deliver leaflets.

We also pass house by house,

carrying a cage with the male mosquito.

So that people can see that it's true

that the male does not bite.

The male doesn't transmit any disease.

The males cannot harm anyone.

As zika has spread to the United States,

so have the fears that scientists

are messing with mother nature

with as yet unknown consequences.

But Guilherme and his colleagues

and Oxitec argue their technique is a smarter

and safer way to fight mosquito-borne disease.

The beauty of this thing is that it's the most

environmental friendly way to fight the mosquito.

That without releasing 1 gram of pesticide in the environment,

we're not going to harm bumblebees.

We're not going to harm honey bees.

We're not going to harm any other insects

in the environment.

Hacking into the basic biology of life

is merely science's first step

in combating the deadly forces of nature.

Every year, millions of people

suffer the wrath of natural disasters

like hurricanes and tornadoes.

We can't hope to build defenses

against these colossal forces.

But perhaps we can use our ingenuity to tame them.

Sometimes, it feels like the Earth is out to get us.

When Katrina hit New Orleans,

it took more than 1,000 lives

and flooded 80% of the city.

Hurricanes are so powerful, they can take water

and turn it into a swirling vortex of destruction.

Today, we are building better defenses.

But they're never guaranteed to hold off nature's power.

Maybe we're going about this the wrong way.

Could we use our ingenuity

to hack into nature directly?

And turn a storm into a tempest in a teacup?

Every year, hurricanes and tropical storms