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.
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.
WinDbg is just a debugger: it does not assemble or disassemble. It can't patch running programs in memory. Moreover, I don't consider Windows to be part of the modern era, as I haven't used a Windows machine for 20 years.
A more apt analogy: I don't consider North Sentinel Island to be part of the modern world, since there is no relevant innovation going on there, it has no influence on the rest of the world, and there is nothing to be learned there.
Okay, but is it not what you wished for, "a similar tool for the modern era"?
edit: I see I simul-posted with u/modeless, but I can't remove it now that there's a (duplicate) reply. Maybe mods can remove or at least collapse mine (their ID is one lower so they were first)
WinDbg is just a debugger: it does not assemble or disassemble. It can't patch running programs in memory. Moreover, I don't consider Windows to be part of the modern era, as I haven't used a Windows machine for 20 years.
If OP wanted to know whether WinDbg and debug.com can be considered feature-similar, they could have read my first comment [1], where I specifically said that debug.com is a "debugger, *assembler*, and *disassembler*". Of those three features, WinDbg provides one.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
OK, you bring up a very good point. If the eggs fail to hatch because they are never fertilized, then the mosquitoes are not acting as a vector because they do not transmit the disease. I didn't even consider that possibility.
That wikipedia article says that there are embryos, but the embryos die.
However, the real question to ask, I guess, is whether the embryo is infected. As I read that article, it sounds like it isn't. Instead, the male parent is infected and this creates sperm which can fertilize the egg but in a way that creates an embryo that can't survive. In other words, the male parent has an infectious disease which causes the embryo to have a fatal genetic disease.
So this also brings up another question: what exactly is a vector? In this scenario, the embryo has a disease it would not otherwise have gotten, if it weren't for this germ. However, the embryo doesn't have the germ itself. Is being a vector defined by whether some disease is caused, or is it defined by whether the germ is spread? I don't know.
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.
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.
Yes but you’re assuming that whatever they put into our environment will target that perfectly. I’m concerned there’ll be other effects and that such releases aren’t reversible.
They are releasing sterile males of one specific species, infected with a naturally occurring bacteria that naturally infects them in the wild as well. It's hard to imagine a more targeted or less objectionable method than this. If you won't accept this method then you're essentially arguing we should never attempt to reduce the invasive mosquito population by any means, which I will have to respectfully but strongly disagree with.
I can imagine many ways this can backfire. The simplest is - the targeting you’re assuming may not be actually what happens. It may be that some number of bugs released are different and have an unintended side effect. What gives this private organization the right to run this experiment on all of us? Will they assume liability?
If you mean that seriously: homo sapiens came into existence in Africa, existed solely there for a long time (generating lots of genetic diversity) and then spread throughout the world in multiple waves. It's complicated by the fact that there was no single location and population that became homo sapiens- it was more like a network of locations and populations that evolved concurrently (there was genetic exchange between them as they evolved from their predecessor species).
Depending on how you define it, I could see "parts of Africa" as being "native" but that doesn't really help this discussion.
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 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?
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.
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.
Just type u and strike Enter
WinDbg?
WinDbg is a cool, but debug.com predates it by quite a bit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debug_(command)
Thus making it "a similar tool for the modern era" as you were asking for, IMO.
My favorite thing about WinDbg is that many people pronounce it "Windbag".
WinDbg is just a debugger: it does not assemble or disassemble. It can't patch running programs in memory. Moreover, I don't consider Windows to be part of the modern era, as I haven't used a Windows machine for 20 years.
So, no, WinDbg has nothing to do with debug.com.
> I don't consider Windows to be part of the modern era, as I haven't used a Windows machine for 20 years.
I don't consider France to be part of the modern world, since I haven't visited Europe lately.
A more apt analogy: I don't consider North Sentinel Island to be part of the modern world, since there is no relevant innovation going on there, it has no influence on the rest of the world, and there is nothing to be learned there.
I'm not sure what you think a (native) debugger that can't disassemble would look like; I assure you it disassembles the instructions you debug.
Its assembler is sadly stuck in the pre-x86_64 era (and refuses to do arm at all), however it disassembles all of those fine.
Signed: someone who does pronounce it wind bag
Okay, but is it not what you wished for, "a similar tool for the modern era"?
edit: I see I simul-posted with u/modeless, but I can't remove it now that there's a (duplicate) reply. Maybe mods can remove or at least collapse mine (their ID is one lower so they were first)
WinDbg is just a debugger: it does not assemble or disassemble. It can't patch running programs in memory. Moreover, I don't consider Windows to be part of the modern era, as I haven't used a Windows machine for 20 years.
So, no, WinDbg has nothing to do with debug.com.
Fun! So how was OP supposed to know your very personal and weird definition of what is part of the modern era?
If OP wanted to know whether WinDbg and debug.com can be considered feature-similar, they could have read my first comment [1], where I specifically said that debug.com is a "debugger, *assembler*, and *disassembler*". Of those three features, WinDbg provides one.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48362927
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...
Seems like you’re referring to the same initiative - https://blog.debug.com/2026/05/debug-expands-in-singapore-bu...
No, check these videos which are 4-6 years older.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4k5xfrkR4Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cH57Oo-FYQ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAcxBNcAV00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGiCO_4EqoU
The FAQ on the website says their first study was completed in 2018 and results published in 2020.
Glad to see movement here!
It's been so long since I've heard about Debug that I was afraid it was cancelled.
More generally, it's known as the sterile insect technique and you'll find plenty of campaigns with some googling.
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.
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?
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 would eliminate a natural control mechanism on humans that's for sure.
it is unlikely that other mosquitos (that don’t carry disease) will fail to fill the niche
Is this safe? I hope it doesn't affect the ecology in worse ways we won't foresee, it has happened before
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
OK, you bring up a very good point. If the eggs fail to hatch because they are never fertilized, then the mosquitoes are not acting as a vector because they do not transmit the disease. I didn't even consider that possibility.
However, it turns out the eggs are fertilized. Note that the FAQ says the males are effectively sterile and links here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytoplasmic_incompatibility
That wikipedia article says that there are embryos, but the embryos die.
However, the real question to ask, I guess, is whether the embryo is infected. As I read that article, it sounds like it isn't. Instead, the male parent is infected and this creates sperm which can fertilize the egg but in a way that creates an embryo that can't survive. In other words, the male parent has an infectious disease which causes the embryo to have a fatal genetic disease.
So this also brings up another question: what exactly is a vector? In this scenario, the embryo has a disease it would not otherwise have gotten, if it weren't for this germ. However, the embryo doesn't have the germ itself. Is being a vector defined by whether some disease is caused, or is it defined by whether the germ is spread? I don't know.
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.
Linus was my boss at Google for nearly 10 years. His main contribution was one of the key people behind Chrome. He's as good as they come.
What a domain name !
(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...
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)
The effect of this could make some mostly uninhabitable areas more habitable.
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.
The species is not native. Surely we can agree that eradicating non-native species is a good thing?
Yes but you’re assuming that whatever they put into our environment will target that perfectly. I’m concerned there’ll be other effects and that such releases aren’t reversible.
They are releasing sterile males of one specific species, infected with a naturally occurring bacteria that naturally infects them in the wild as well. It's hard to imagine a more targeted or less objectionable method than this. If you won't accept this method then you're essentially arguing we should never attempt to reduce the invasive mosquito population by any means, which I will have to respectfully but strongly disagree with.
I can imagine many ways this can backfire. The simplest is - the targeting you’re assuming may not be actually what happens. It may be that some number of bugs released are different and have an unintended side effect. What gives this private organization the right to run this experiment on all of us? Will they assume liability?
> Surely we can agree that eradicating non-native species is a good thing?
So...which areas is humanity native to?
If you mean that seriously: homo sapiens came into existence in Africa, existed solely there for a long time (generating lots of genetic diversity) and then spread throughout the world in multiple waves. It's complicated by the fact that there was no single location and population that became homo sapiens- it was more like a network of locations and populations that evolved concurrently (there was genetic exchange between them as they evolved from their predecessor species).
Depending on how you define it, I could see "parts of Africa" as being "native" but that doesn't really help this discussion.
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
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.