In this week’s magazine, I write about a controversial new technology that could eventually enable scientists to eliminate an entire species of disease-causing mosquito. The benefits could be great: As the most efficient transmitter of disease in the animal kingdom, mosquitoes cause more than a million deaths a year. The technology, which uses a genetic editing technique that essentially forces mosquitoes to breed themselves out of existence by preventing the creation of female offspring, could also be used to engineer mosquitoes incapable of carrying disease.