A few summers ago I gave consideration to moving to Florida or Texas. This was 2021 when it felt like there was a collective madness in my hometown of New York City. If you remember that moment, you remember the destinations where people like me were fleeing. I was looking into places like Florida and Texas. The so-called free states, the escape hatches (not my framing but more of a public consciousness in a particular demographic that I had seemed to become a part of). I compiled spreadsheets about neighborhoods, school lists, and initiated other projects you do when you’re about to uproot your family.
And somewhere in that diligence I came across a company called Oxitec. They breed genetically modified mosquitoes. In May 2020, the EPA approved an experimental release permit. The two states cleared for field testing were Florida and Texas.
I’ll share what happened next in the spirit of transparency, even if it makes me look a little ridiculous in retrospect. I sat there and thought: the two states I’m considering as my escape are the two states approved for experimental GMO insect release. And then I wondered: are the escape hatches just honeypots to round up the dissidents?
And then I thought: who and what have I become? I mean that’s insane, right? Does a reasonable person wonder if Bill Gates personally zoned his retirement? I remember actually feeling embarrassed, alone in my own head. I’d spent two decades in tech. I didn’t know it at the time but I played my own tiny role in helping build some of the surveillance plumbing I now write about. I am not a man who is easily spooked by an internet meme. And here I was, pattern-matching my way out of a real estate decision as if the ticks had lobbyists.
For a variety of reasons we left NYC but stayed in the state. Partly logistics, but also because by 2021 I’d talked myself into the conclusion that whatever was happening was global, and if that was true, fleeing somewhere wasn’t really an escape. Some places might have had longer runways than others, but I wasn’t going to live as a man on the run. My wife and I decided it was better for us to optimize for quality of life, and we ultimately decided to stay in New York in a more rural setting. I’m not going to suggest that decision was vindicated, because it wasn’t, not cleanly anyway (though we’re mostly a happy family).
In the years since, however, I kept running into pieces of that mosquito story that I couldn’t quite make myself stop assembling.
This past week Marty Bent posted something that made me revisit a lot of my research from that era.
Two professors at a medical school in Michigan published a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Bioethics. Their argument is that it is “morally obligatory” to genetically engineer ticks to spread a disease that makes humans violently allergic to red meat.
My first reaction was the natural one, in my opinion. It had to be an Onion or Babylon Bee headline someone laundered through a fake citation. People don’t really write ideas like this down, do they? They certainly don’t get them reviewed by their peers.
So I checked and it turned out to be real. Bioethics, volume 39, issue 8, pages 772 through 781. Published online July 2025. It’s indexed in PubMed. You can pull it up on Wiley right now. The authors are Parker Crutchfield and Blake Hereth, both at Western Michigan University’s Homer Stryker MD School of Medicine. The paper is called “Beneficial Bloodsucking.”
The author’s actual argument – and remember this is not satire – is that alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), the tick-borne red meat allergy, is a “moral bioenhancer.” Their logic: if eating meat is morally wrong, and the allergy makes you stop eating meat (because it will now kill you), then the allergy makes you a better person. From there they build what they call the Convergence Argument, which in plain English means “multiple different ethical frameworks all happen to point at the same conclusion, so the conclusion must be solid.” And the conclusion they land on is that promoting the syndrome is “strongly pro tanto obligatory” – which is bioethics-speak for “We have a strong duty to do this, all else being equal.”
What that means, in their own words, is that researchers have an obligation to “genetically edit the disease-carrying capacity of ticks.” Translation: engineer the ticks to spread the allergy more effectively. That people are obligated to promote its spread. And – this is the part I had to read twice – that efforts to develop an inoculation against AGS are morally problematic. The paper argues that blocking the spread of AGS is “impermissible.” Because in their framing it isn’t a disease. A disease is something you’d want to fix. This is being presented as an enhancement, something which ought not to be cured.
Releasing engineered disease-carrying ticks on people who didn’t ask for it, they frame it as a “vaccination.” It “infringes” on your bodily autonomy, they say, rather than “violating” it.
Infringe versus violate is a distinction without a difference. But the authors argue that the “difference” is the delivery mechanism – a tick happened to bite you, rather than a person holding you down. But that argument only works if you’ve already granted the premise underneath it: that some authority gets to decide which of your behaviors requires an engineered biological correction, and that the only open question is whether the needle has legs. They don’t actually argue for that premise. My guess is that they just need you not to notice it’s there so you don’t realize it’s both grotesque and yet another violation of Nuremberg. (But who’s counting…)
And the paper goes further than tick engineering. It notes that “It may be feasible for a person to take synthetic AGS to grocery stores and secretly inject it into beef, pork, lamb, etc.” They’re not just theorizing about vectors. They’re walking through operational logistics.
Of course, you could file the whole thing under fringe academics doing the thing fringe academics do. Floating something that’s incredibly out there just to get cited. I might have done that had I not learned that this is not the first time this particular idea has been floated.
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