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.
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.
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.
I'm hoping that at some point someone just disregards all the "safety" debate, does it, and succeeds. There is something deeply upsetting about being in the position humanity is on earth and still being expected to tolerate being eaten alive.
I wonder why we don't just try it on some remote island that has had mosquitoes introduced to it, but is otherwise considered isolated from the rest of the ecosystem (at least as far as mosquitoes are concerned).
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.
I am not an expert, but the last time I looked at this kind of thing what I took away from it was that you're not really doing anything to negatively impact the total mosquito population, you're just creating a new nesting site that won't produce adults. My understanding was that while it might feel good, it is not actually doing much to impact the 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?
Every time a wild female mates with a sterile male, that's one less time they've mated with a viable male. It greatly reduces the number of successful females and therefore the size of the following generation.
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
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?
Ae. aegypti is not native to California. We won't miss it.
This is addressed in their FAQ as well: "The general consensus among scientists is that the ecological impact of removing Aedes aegypti mosquitoes from urban environment would be small. They are not a significant food source for other animals and are invasive to many areas. The main ecological impact would be to restore the ecosystem to how it was before the mosquitoes invaded. Debug team is committed to working with communities and regulators to ensure the safety and acceptability of our field trials and releases."
This was tested in Singapore 10 years ago and successfully reduced the spread of Dengue fever by 77% and has not negatively impacted the ecosystem.
This isn't a project to eliminate all mosquitos. There are over 3600 species of mosquito - this project is only targeting one: Aedes aegypti, which spreads many diseases, and is in fact an invasive species. Anywhere you see an Aedes aegypti outside of North Africa, it was humans who brought it there in the first place. This project is just trying to undo that.
In the FAQ they discuss how in most of its range this particular species is invasive, feeds almost exclusively on humans, and is not believed to be a major food source for predators.
It's impossible to prove this (or really anything in human health/global ecology) is safe. We cannot reliably predict what the true short and long term outcomes will be, but by and large, this seems like one of the less unsafe ecological modification projects based on the underlying technology.
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.
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.
This organization is going out of the way to avoid spraying insecticides. It seems far more effective than increasing predators because ecosystems tend to adapt to predation.
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.
I had the same question when reading website - really poorly explained. Not sure why they also advertise that those genetically modified males are non biting and harmless - all males mosquitos are like that.
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.
The main concern was that animal who feed on mosquitoes (birds) might be affected but most mosquitoes don't bite and the animals who eat them also eat a lot of other insects. I would worry much more about pesticides that may be the reason for the great insect population collapse.
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.
It's more the latter - as far as I am aware, eliminating specifically the human pathogenic mosquitoes will still leave plenty of other mosquito-adjacent species that can't or don't bite humans, or can't / don't transmit the critical diseases.
I think for the releasing-sterile-mosquitoes angle, it's actually more interesting to me to use some kind of molecular clock, I think I read about a genetic modification that resulted in a generation or two of fertile males, but then the Nth generation is sterile as a result of the molecular clock unwinding.
It looks like the project has been decoupled from Verily (based on my poking about on the website) and is hosted within Google (the project lead, Linus Upson, worked for both Google and Verily simultaneously; he was mainly an eng manager/project lead, but had some historical experience with biology in school). Linus played a critical role at Google and built an awful lot of goodwill with the leadership.
Linus's LinkedIn indicates debug moved from verily to google in Dec 2024 (I missed this at the time). Debug was always a passion project (unlikely to make a huge amount of money compared to ads, AI, and cloud) and Verily's transition to something that lost less money probably required them to move Debug back to Google.
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?
Developing new vaccines is expensive, and if the target population is mostly in poor countries, there's nobody to foot the bill. That's why these diseases are called "neglected".
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.
> raise sterile males and release them into wild insect populations. When a wild female mates with a sterile male, her eggs won’t hatch. The population gets smaller with each generation.
They won't harm then it sounds like, but they'll not fertilize the eggs.
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?
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
71 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?
Why does the website have Google branding at the bottom? Is it a Google project or associated with Google somehow?
Good work! The animations are super cool, how did you make them?
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.
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.
I'm hoping that at some point someone just disregards all the "safety" debate, does it, and succeeds. There is something deeply upsetting about being in the position humanity is on earth and still being expected to tolerate being eaten alive.
I wonder why we don't just try it on some remote island that has had mosquitoes introduced to it, but is otherwise considered isolated from the rest of the ecosystem (at least as far as mosquitoes are concerned).
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.
I am not an expert, but the last time I looked at this kind of thing what I took away from it was that you're not really doing anything to negatively impact the total mosquito population, you're just creating a new nesting site that won't produce adults. My understanding was that while it might feel good, it is not actually doing much to impact the population.
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...
Original Singapore results from Debug in 2019 - "greater than 90% reduction in release areas":
https://blog.debug.com/2019/11/singapore-collaboration-achie...
Since 2011 in northern Australia: https://www.worldmosquitoprogram.org/en/news-stories/stories...
Seems like you’re referring to the same initiative - https://blog.debug.com/2026/05/debug-expands-in-singapore-bu...
More generally, it's known as the sterile insect technique and you'll find plenty of campaigns with some googling.
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?
Every time a wild female mates with a sterile male, that's one less time they've mated with a viable male. It greatly reduces the number of successful females and therefore the size of the following generation.
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
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?
Ae. aegypti is not native to California. We won't miss it.
This is addressed in their FAQ as well: "The general consensus among scientists is that the ecological impact of removing Aedes aegypti mosquitoes from urban environment would be small. They are not a significant food source for other animals and are invasive to many areas. The main ecological impact would be to restore the ecosystem to how it was before the mosquitoes invaded. Debug team is committed to working with communities and regulators to ensure the safety and acceptability of our field trials and releases."
it is unlikely that other mosquitos (that don’t carry disease) will fail to fill the niche
It would eliminate a natural control mechanism on humans that's for sure.
Is this safe? I hope it doesn't affect the ecology in worse ways we won't foresee, it has happened before
Principal Skinner: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Principal Skinner: No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Principal Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: Then we're stuck with gorillas!
Principal Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
This was tested in Singapore 10 years ago and successfully reduced the spread of Dengue fever by 77% and has not negatively impacted the ecosystem.
This isn't a project to eliminate all mosquitos. There are over 3600 species of mosquito - this project is only targeting one: Aedes aegypti, which spreads many diseases, and is in fact an invasive species. Anywhere you see an Aedes aegypti outside of North Africa, it was humans who brought it there in the first place. This project is just trying to undo that.
In the FAQ they discuss how in most of its range this particular species is invasive, feeds almost exclusively on humans, and is not believed to be a major food source for predators.
It's impossible to prove this (or really anything in human health/global ecology) is safe. We cannot reliably predict what the true short and long term outcomes will be, but by and large, this seems like one of the less unsafe ecological modification projects based on the underlying technology.
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.
Cool project! And, surely, absolutely not what I expected to see when I clicked the domain "debug.com".
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.
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochliomyia_hominivorax
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.
This organization is going out of the way to avoid spraying insecticides. It seems far more effective than increasing predators because ecosystems tend to adapt to predation.
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.
How are they getting in?
Why does releasing infertile males prevent the fertile males from reproducing? Are mosquitoes pair-bonding??
I had the same question when reading website - really poorly explained. Not sure why they also advertise that those genetically modified males are non biting and harmless - all males mosquitos are like that.
And also since they don't bite, they won't compete for the same resources / food.
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.
I love this idea but I feel scared as well; who knows what we discover when we wipe these bugs out...
The main concern was that animal who feed on mosquitoes (birds) might be affected but most mosquitoes don't bite and the animals who eat them also eat a lot of other insects. I would worry much more about pesticides that may be the reason for the great insect population collapse.
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.
It's more the latter - as far as I am aware, eliminating specifically the human pathogenic mosquitoes will still leave plenty of other mosquito-adjacent species that can't or don't bite humans, or can't / don't transmit the critical diseases.
I think for the releasing-sterile-mosquitoes angle, it's actually more interesting to me to use some kind of molecular clock, I think I read about a genetic modification that resulted in a generation or two of fertile males, but then the Nth generation is sterile as a result of the molecular clock unwinding.
Less mosquitoes, more bees please :)
This is cool, but wasn't this a "Verily" project about 10 years ago? What is new here and what has happened since then?
It looks like the project has been decoupled from Verily (based on my poking about on the website) and is hosted within Google (the project lead, Linus Upson, worked for both Google and Verily simultaneously; he was mainly an eng manager/project lead, but had some historical experience with biology in school). Linus played a critical role at Google and built an awful lot of goodwill with the leadership.
Linus's LinkedIn indicates debug moved from verily to google in Dec 2024 (I missed this at the time). Debug was always a passion project (unlikely to make a huge amount of money compared to ads, AI, and cloud) and Verily's transition to something that lost less money probably required them to move Debug back to Google.
Quick NPR Short Wave episode about this https://www.npr.org/2026/05/27/nx-s1-5806598/disease-science...
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?
Developing new vaccines is expensive, and if the target population is mostly in poor countries, there's nobody to foot the bill. That's why these diseases are called "neglected".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neglected_tropical_diseases#Ec...
heh, i almost upvoted your comment, but then you contradicted the main reasoning at the end.
(intervention in a complex system, and without proper testing at that... even if the covid vaccines were safe, that was by luck)
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.
> raise sterile males and release them into wild insect populations. When a wild female mates with a sterile male, her eggs won’t hatch. The population gets smaller with each generation.
They won't harm then it sounds like, but they'll not fertilize the eggs.
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?
"Life, uh, finds a way."
Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park
great use of the domain
(2017)
Unless there's been some new announcement that I don't obviously see here?
There was an update to the blog on May 11, 2026, referring to this up-to-date press release: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/debug.com/en//pre...
What a domain name !
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.
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)
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 species is not native. Surely we can agree that eradicating non-native species is a good thing?
This is a Google project?
The effect of this could make some mostly uninhabitable areas more habitable.
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
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. :)
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.