Leslie Vosshall thought she had it nailed. Last March, she and two colleagues at Rockefeller University published an elegant series of experiments that seemed to settle the 50-year-old question of how the insect repellent DEET kept mosquitoes at bay (Science, 319:1838-42, 2008). "It doesn't smell bad to insects," Vosshall told a reporter from Science, "It masks or inhibits their ability to smell you."
It was a public victory for Vosshall's lab and her funder, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. As the gold standard of insect repellents, understanding how and why DEET works so well is critical to designing the next generation of chemicals, which may head off insect-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever. Behind the scenes, however, some entomologists expressed puzzlement.
Laurence Zwiebel of Vanderbilt University (also a Gates' grantee) says he remained circumspect when a reporter asked his opinion of Vosshall's research. Ulrich Bernier of the ...
