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...
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Debug Project
21–30 of 127 posts
Re: Debug Project
#22This 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...
Seems like you’re referring to the same initiative - https://blog.debug.com/2026/05/debug-expands-in-singapore-bu...
Glad to see movement here!
It's been so long since I've heard about Debug that I was afraid it was cancelled.
Re: Debug Project
#23This 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...
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
Re: Debug Project
#24I 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.
Re: Debug Project
#25I 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 f…
Less mosquitoes, more bees please :)
Re: Debug Project
#26This 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.
Re: Debug Project
#27I 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 f…
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.
Re: Debug Project
#28Is this safe? I hope it doesn't affect the ecology in worse ways we won't foresee, it has happened before
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.
Re: Debug Project
#29The 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?
Re: Debug Project
#30No 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?