Google’s great mosquito debugging project
It sounds like the premise of a bad science-fiction film: Google’s parent company is flooding part of central California with millions of bacteria-infected mosquitoes incubated by robots.
The goal is the mass extermination of a local population, but this is no sinister plot to wipe out humans living in Fresno county. Instead, Alphabet’s Verily, an offshoot previously known as Google Life Sciences, is attempting to kill off an invasive species of mosquito that has the potential to transmit deadly viruses. The Debug Fresno test will be the largest experiment of its kind in the US so far.
Aedes aegypti mosquitoes arrived in the central San Joaquin Valley in 2013 and have been known to carry the Zika virus, dengue, yellow fever and chikungunya, although none of those viruses have yet spread in Fresno. To fight the invaders, Verily will release one million laboratory-bred mosquitoes every week for 20 weeks. All will be male – which means that they will not bite people, as only the females have a taste for human blood.
Crucially, all have been infected with a bacteria called Wolbachia pipientis, which has no effect on humans but renders the male carriers sterile. Any wild female mosquito that does not share the same infection produces dead eggs when it breeds with them, which should eventually cause the population to drop.
‘‘Our software algorithms and on-the-ground release devices will allow us to distribute the sterile male mosquitoes in an even and targeted way throughout Fresno’s mosquito season,’’ Jacob Crawford, a Verily scientist, wrote in a blog post detailing the plan. ‘‘Moving our work from the laboratory to the field is not only an important milestone for our group of biologists, engineers and automation experts, but it’s also a critical step in bringing our longterm vision to reality.’’’
The Debug Fresno project is led by Linus Upson, an engineering chief for Verily who previously helped to create Google’s Chrome browser. ‘‘If we can show that this technique can work, I’m confident we can make it a sustainable business, because the burden of these mosquitoes is enormous,’’ he said.