Entomology: Swatting Mosquitoes with Sex

As insects become more immune to chemical insecticides, scientists are developing other weapons against them. Like sex. By encouraging the mating of mosquitoes that are incapable of producing offspring, a West German scientist has wiped out the disease-bearing mosquito population of a Burmese village. And, the attraction that proved so fatal in Burma, he reported to a recent health conference in Washington, can have similar results elsewhere.

While experimenting in 1948, Geneticist Hannes Laven of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz discovered that common mosquitoes from Paris that were mated with members of the same species from Hamburg would not produce...