Two or three times a month, Leslie B. Vosshall, the Robin Chemers Neustein Professor in the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior, at the Rockefeller University, is required to feed the subjects under inquiry in her lab. In order to do so, she rolls up her sleeve and inserts her arm into the netting cage in which the creatures in question, mosquitoes, are kept. It’s not unusual for her to get two hundred and fifty bites in a few minutes, she explained the other day, with blasé good humor. ¶ Vosshall is attempting to discover why some people seem more attractive to mosquitoes than others.
As someone who seems to cop more than his fair share of bites, this research interests me greatly—but not, perhaps, as much as the incidental discoveries Vosshall and her team might make:
If you should get bitten, the most effective treatment Vosshall has found is to immediately run the welt under the hottest water tolerable. How this works is as mysterious as the logic of mosquitoes’ blood preferences. “The mosquitoes leave a protein on the skin, so it could be that the hot water cooks it, like cooking an egg,” she suggested. “That’s one idea. The other idea is that you are exchanging one form of pain for another.”