NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Friday, July 21, 2017

Fresno, meet Aedes aegypti.

Aedes aegypti, meet Fresno.

In perhaps its most buzz-worthy project ever, Google’s sister company Verily has begun releasing 20 million mosquitoes in two neighborhoods in the state’s fifth-largest city, a fledgling effort to solve one of the planet’s most devastating health problems, one mosquito at a time.

The so-called Debug Project by Alphabet’s life-sciences unit has set itself a lofty goal: “To reduce the devastating global health impact that disease-carrying mosquitoes inflict on people around the world.”