Entomologists are now working behind the doors of a bio-safety lab at one of largest multinational conglomerates in the world, Alphabet. This is a part of a new effort by the search giant to create automated insect farms.
This work is a new project by Alphabet’s healthcare spin-off, Verily, which is working towards to release millions or billions of sterilized mosquitoes as a method to battle the spread of dengue and Zika virus, including U.S. cities.
This plan, sponsored by Alphabet, involves new technology for breeding of mosquitoes, geospatial software to track them, and plans for pilot testing where the mosquitoes will be released in urban areas.
The project however, is still at an early stage and is the brainchild of Linus Upson, a senior Google engineer who previously headed Chrome. Verily says it has announced this project because it is hoping to conduct field tests of its mosquitoes, plans that would become public anyway. “It’s labor-intensive, and we want to bring some engineering to it,” says Upson. “We can make it cheaper to do at scale.”
