[ryanseys]

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 :)

[varun_ch]

it's a beautiful website, if ain't broke don't fix it, right?

[coolness]

Good work! The animations are super cool, how did you make them?

[psnehanshu]

Why does the website have Google branding at the bottom? Is it a Google project or associated with Google somehow?

[alienreborn]

Verily (under which this project exists) is part of Alphabet.

[dekhn]

This project is not part of Verily any more- it moved back to Google.

[psnehanshu]

That's kind of out of character for Google. Their motto is to organize world's information, not cure diseases.

[dekhn]

Google has a number of passion projects typically run by people who established credibility/value to Google a long time ago. Not surprisingly, some of those are medical/biological in nature, because that's an area that tech people like to contribute in after they've reached tenure.

I was a computational biologist and specifically went to work at Google to get access to their world-information-organizing technology to apply it to medical/biological problems. I was convinced at the time (mid-to-late 2000s) that AI was going to transform medicine, especially drug discovery, and that huge amounts of (organized) data was going to be key to achieving this goal. While there, we worked on protein folding and design and drug discovery, as part of a team that eventually was called Google Accelerated Sciences. It was mostly made up of people who had some level of scientific background, then had made $$$ for Google, and made good friends with the leadership and could use some of the research budget.

Of course, the protein folding and design work ended up being replaced by DeepMind's work on protein structure prediction, which led to protein design and drug discovery, mainly in DM spinoffs.

Many people at Google who work on CS stuff would absolutely love to see Google's resources applied to curing diseases. I know that Jeff Dean has been angel investor in this space.