Tucked away in a Tomsich Hall laboratory, Roman Cicero ’28 is spending his summer studying hundreds of teeny-tiny subjects — mosquitoes. And while their stature may be small, he knows that their implications for public health are larger-than-life.
“There are 525,600 minutes in a year. Mosquitoes account for over 700,000 deaths a year globally, which means every minute, more than one person is dying from a mosquito-borne illness,” Cicero says as he finishes his lab work for the day.
This summer, Cicero is continuing two semesters of previous work with Assistant Professor of Chemistry Matthew Rouhier in “The Mosquito Lab,” as it’s called, where students raise, feed and study Aedes aegypti, a species of mosquito known for transmitting dengue fever. Also known as breakbone fever, dengue is a viral, potentially fatal illness most common in tropical and subtropical regions — though it has become an increasingly global concern.
The lab’s ultimate goal is to limit the mosquito’s ability to transmit disease.
“We’re interested in creating a new pesticide for mosquitoes,” Cicero says over the tinkering of his labmates. “When mosquitoes bite, there’s also a whole bunch of waste products and xenobiotics — just foreign materials — in that blood, which they have to then siphon out of their body. So we’re thinking if we can prevent them from siphoning those out, we will trap all those waste materials in them and they’ll die.”
The lab’s novel approach could ensure that diseases like dengue fever and malaria die with the mosquitoes that carry them. Cicero is attempting to trace the journey of certain chemicals through the microscopic anatomy of these insects. This entails the study of incredibly small proteins within the mosquito that transport various chemicals — like pesticides — throughout the insect’s body.
Around Cicero, the lab pulses with chatter and the rhythms of a dedicated lab playlist. Pop icons belt over the whirring centrifuge. A poster on the wall reads, “Science, Not Silence.” A few feet away, a blackboard hosts a variety of notes scrawled in colorful handwriting. One offers a joke: “What does the British mosquito say?” A doodled mosquito answers, “M’laria.”
The lab’s actual mosquitoes do not talk, nor do they carry malaria (or any other disease). Each day, Cicero dissects mosquitoes under a microscope with tweezers. He searches through the small-bodied pests for even tinier tissues, investigating how the mosquitoes’ excretory systems function.
“It takes so much focus, and the mosquito is so small,” Cicero says. “If you drew a line on paper with a pen, that’s the size of these tissues. Very small, and very hard to get enough to do all our work with.”
While Cicero’s dissections begin to paint the picture, his own experiment will hopefully complete it later this summer.
“My goal is to isolate this transport protein and assay it against different chemicals and see how it interacts with them, whether it transports them or not,” Cicero explains. “And that’ll tell us a little bit more about (how) our chemicals are leaving the mosquito.”
A mosaic of very small pieces, the work of Cicero and his labmates has the potential to make massive strides in disease control and public health. Their work is an important step in the development of a new pesticide, and responds to an increasing need for defense against mosquito-borne disease.
For Cicero, a molecular biology major from Arcadia, California, this summer’s research continues not only his education at Kenyon, but also his life-long interest in medicine and public health. Working in the lab, Cicero has found a way to pursue those passions — and his vision for a better world.
“For a long time, I wondered: Do I become a doctor or do I become a researcher?” Cicero says. “And ultimately, I realized that I really want to help people on a larger scale. I want to create a drug that saves millions of people.”
This article was written by Anna Matu ’28 as part of the Hoskins Frame Summer Science Writing Scholars program.