▲ 274 points
back
117 comments
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 :)
it's a beautiful website, if ain't broke don't fix it, right?
Good work! The animations are super cool, how did you make them?
Why does the website have Google branding at the bottom? Is it a Google project or associated with Google somehow?
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.
The DEBUG utility was originally named DEBUG.COM in early versions
of MS-DOS, but it was renamed to DEBUG.EXE starting with MS-DOS 3.2
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who immediately thought of this.
And yes, some of us are either old enough that we remember DEBUG.COM, or we got started way too young.
Oh wow. I remember doing this as well... with little to no success.
The debug.com binary only showed one measly ASM instruction at a time as I recall. Shudder.
WinDbg?
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.
Gene drives are such amazing and such frightening technology. No one puts them in the same conversation as nukes or engineered pandemics, but they share the same pattern of "technology improvements giving smaller and smaller actors globally reaching powers", and have even more potential for consequences not intended by those actors. It's pretty scary to imagine a world where one lab or one rich farmer has the power to (after a few dozen generations) globally make arbitrary edits the DNA of entire species. Even smart and goodhearted people can screw up that world.
So from this armchair, I'm glad to see that at least for aedes aegypti (which seems like the clearest case for deploying a gene drive), there's an alternative like debug.
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...
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
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)
Is this safe? I hope it doesn't affect the ecology in worse ways we won't foresee, it has happened before
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?
Cool project! And, surely, absolutely not what I expected to see when I clicked the domain "debug.com".
The critics have valid concerns. Verily / Google would be deploying 10-15x the local mosquito population (enough to black out the sun). The deployments are contaminated with females, as any natural product would be. And it’s possible that the mosquitos could develop Wolbachia tolerance, since mosquitos are quick to develop tolerance due to their breeding patterns and lifecycle.
Don’t be so quick to rush to a verdict. We are still living with invasives we introduced with the same good intentions.
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.
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.
The past 2 years in CA have been brutal for these invasive mosquitos. They bite all day and literally swarm around my house. It'll be 1pm on a hot day and they are all over.
I know this isn't attainable for most of the world but sharing in case someone else is similarly frustrated. I ended up spending $500 on a trap w/ co2 tank and it has been a life changer. I don't even see mosquitos anymore. Refilling the co2 is quite annoying and expensive ($20 every other week) and you have to clean out the 100s of bugs from the trap net but I can literally sit in my backyard all day again.
I wonder if a cheaper trap could be designed to give everyone little bubbles of safety.
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)
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.
Interestingly, many other insects need blood to reproduce because they cannot produce some of the required proteins on their own. Some common flies do this too, including horseflies, black flies, sand flies, and others. Some famously transmit disease, like the tsetse fly.
It makes me wonder if this kind of technology is deployed, where should the stop line be? And I don't think it's a trivial question.
For those unaware, the US govt has run a similar project in Central America and most recently Panama (think Darien Gap) to eradicate the New World screwworm fly. They use similar techniques.
This is cool, but wasn't this a "Verily" project about 10 years ago? What is new here and what has happened since then?
Why does releasing infertile males prevent the fertile males from reproducing? Are mosquitoes pair-bonding??
Quick NPR Short Wave episode about this https://www.npr.org/2026/05/27/nx-s1-5806598/disease-science...
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.
Maybe a dumb question, but why release them back? Why separate and raise sterile males when you could kill off both male and female and be done? Is the idea that introducing sterile males back into the population has a compounding effect?
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?
Large scale geo and bio engineering projects like these always worry me because of the potential for second order effects: is there wildlife that depends on these mosquitoes? Will a worse bug fill the resource void? Will a random mutation in the bacteria have adverse effects? What keeps the bad bugs from coming back from tiny populations in relatively short order because we can’t keep releasing new sterile males forever?
Hopefully all of these concerns have satisfactory answers, but the reference to it being a 1950s idea isn’t inspiring. Nuclear powered cars, widespread asbestos use, leaded gasoline, Freon… environmental impact wasn’t as big of a concern back then to put it mildly.
COVID proved that we can produce safe and effective vaccines extremely quickly if we actually try: so why not focus on that?
I love this idea but I feel scared as well; who knows what we discover when we wipe these bugs out...
I thought this was about the old MSDOS debug utility, funnily enough it was named debug.com
The effect of this could make some mostly uninhabitable areas more habitable.
(2017)
Unless there's been some new announcement that I don't obviously see here?
This is a Google project?
What a domain name !
When I read the heading I thought it was about software bugs and really wondered for a microsecond how can we stop bad software bugs with good software bugs. :)
great use of the domain
"Life, uh, finds a way."
Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park