Debug Project

I had a lot of fun building this marketing website for Debug back when I worked at Verily in 2016.

Crazy that despite their progress behind the scenes, they appear to have not touched this website since.

I probably spent a little too much time tweaking the CSS to get the mosquitoes to not overlap the text on various viewport sizes :)

My understanding (very informal armchair) is that someone could relatively easily wipe out aedes aegypti using a gene drive with a sort of sex-selective infertility:

Release a few thousand females carrying a gene drive that produces all infertile males, and all fertile females (who all also have the same gene due to it being a gene drive). Every generation, there are more and more infertile males, and more and more fertile females carrying this extinction gene. After several generations (a.k.a. a few years), the population collapses completely.

I vote yes.

The domain name reminds me of the venerable DOS "debug.com" command, which managed to combine an interactive and scriptable debugger, assembler, and disassembler into a program weighing a few kilobytes. I spent many long hours in my youth using it to reverse engineering copy protection on games. I really wish we had a similar tool for the modern era.

A less high-tech way to reduce mosquitoes in your own back yard is to set up an attractive nesting location, such as a bucket filled with plant cuttings and water with protection from the rain, and putting Bti(Bacillus thuringiensis subspecies israelensis) in it. Bti will kill the larvae after they hatch. You can buy Bti pretty easily, usually in a dehydrated form called mosquitoes bits or mosquito dunks. Make sure to remove other potential nesting locations or add Bti to them too.

This is a great initiative. HOWEVER, THIS IS NOT NEW. This has already been tried and tested successfully in Singapore.

https://www.nea.gov.sg/corporate-functions/resources/researc...

I think supporting the predators of mosquitos is the better solution.

We should go out of our way to avoid spraying insecticides in our lawns and other spaces. The lifecycle of the mosquito is much more rapid than that of fish, spiders, dragonflies, bats, etc. If you regularly nuke an area with insecticides, the mosquito population will have a lot less pressure to deal with.

Heh after reading that title card I thought this was going to be a mosquito based software bug analogy. I expected a description of how to write software that resulted in more "good bugs" that might facilitate finding other bugs somehow. Now I'm a little disappointed

Relevant write up about this: https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/google-mosquitoes

Google Mosquitoes - Debugging Florida

This must have been inspired by Mass Effect :)

(probably the other way around, but what's the fun in that)

The Krogans got punitively infected with the genophage to drastically reduce successful births after their rebellion.

I don't understand non-breedable part, mosquitoes are a part of a food chain as everything else, surely you don't think eliminating them will have no consequences?

Is this safe? I hope it doesn't affect the ecology in worse ways we won't foresee, it has happened before

Cool project! And, surely, absolutely not what I expected to see when I clicked the domain "debug.com".

Interesting. What is the long term effect? Do the bad mosquitoes breed back to a sizeable population after some time and again good mosquitoes have to be injected in the target environment to keep the growth of bad mosquitoes in check?

Quick NPR Short Wave episode about this https://www.npr.org/2026/05/27/nx-s1-5806598/disease-science...

I was about to ask how the mosquitos survive long enough to make an impact if they can't "bite". I looked it up, and apparently male mosquitos survive off of nectar and are actually pollinators.

Eliminating mosquitoes sounds great to me on the surface, but I wonder if it will have any adverse effects on any plants that rely on them for pollination, or if it's expected that there are plenty of other insects ready to fill any void they leave.

The symmetry is amusing. This is really fighting fire with fire.

Mosquitoes are a vector that spreads disease-causing germs to a population. The proposed solution is to use different mosquitoes as different vector that spreads a different disease-causing germ to a different population.

This is cool, but wasn't this a "Verily" project about 10 years ago? What is new here and what has happened since then?

What a domain name !

(2017)

Unless there's been some new announcement that I don't obviously see here?

The effect of this could make some mostly uninhabitable areas more habitable.

The current news:

Google wants to release up to 32M good mosquitoes California and Florida

https://ktla.com/news/google-wants-to-release-up-to-32-milli... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48351077)

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/01/google-pe...

(perhaps one of these should be the submitted link)

This is a Google project?

No thanks. I’m very concerned some short term thinking behind a plan to alter the biology of our environment will have various side effects no one anticipated. It has happened many, many times before. Same with geo engineering in general - hard to trust the incentives, competency, and long term side effects.

This project has like 10 years of history behind it right? Originally powered by Verily Life Sciences (inside Alphabet's Google X research div)

Some previous discussion:

We’re trying to stop bad mosquitoes by raising and releasing good ones (2016)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12657034

Google Has a Plan to Eliminate Mosquitoes (2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18551465

[dead]

For too many seconds I really did think this was an initiative using the metaphor of good/bad mosquitos to make the case that they were going to release "good" malware (bonware?) into the internet ecosystem in order to disable bad malware or install security patches, or something.

I might be an idiot.