Once upon a time, I read some newspaper articles about a Gates Foundation anti-malaria project with a novel twist: it was targeting the mosquitoes that carried the disease. Literally targeting them. With lasers. Cameras searched for the specific wingbeat frequency of the offending breed of mosquito, triangulated the position, and sent that data to the lasers, which cleared the area of those mosquitoes, and only those mosquitoes, quite efficiently. The not-yet-named lead scientist on the project was quoted as terming the system a “weapon of mosquito destruction,” a bit of wordplay that struck me as right up the alley of some folks I knew. Eventually, further down the article, this…