F***n Genophage, how did it work?

Given that I let the genophage continue, I don't think too much about it. Worth it to keep Mordin.

For starters, it doesn't affect males, it affects females. The genophage doesn't reduce fertility but rather reduces the ability to have a viable pregnancy, hence all the conversation about stillbirths.

While I don't think the game ever addressed the specifics of its deployment, the genophage was developed by the Salarians and released by the Turians.

That also makes me wonder how Mordin concocted a cure within a few weeks onboard a ship, but huge Corporations(E.G. Binary Helix) during that time were unable to fix it. Regardless, Krogan still seem pretty common around the Citadel. It makes me wonder how many more of them there were 1,000 years ago.

Best not to think about it too much. The lore on the genophage is all over the place and falls apart with the slightest analysis.

Quarian lore is kind of the same. The idea of an exiled race, trapped in their suits and living in a huge space convoy is pretty cool, so let's not question why they couldn't claim a new colony world before their immune systems were wrecked by living in an over-sterile environment (despite the fact humans have settled dozens in a very short space of time) or why they'd ever have to wear suits on Quarian ships housing only Quarians to begin with!

Mordin had something Binary Helix didn't: access to the original form of the genophage (he'd worked on it and modified it), as well as how it works in modified form.  Even the turians didn't really know how it worked.

I always thought that the whole thing with the Quarians was so that they didn't have to draw Tali with her mask off. That would keep them from having to draw facial expressions as well. Bioware seems very lazy when it comes to 3-D modeling(Each race including the humans pretty have just have one modiel that is simply re-textured or palette-swapped to make more characters). That being said, I was wondering why they waited until the very end of the game to bring up the Quarians, who would have the most incentive to make a 600 year journey.

Given how ineffective corporations tend to be, about dealing with certain kinds of problems, Mordin's divergent success did not seem all that incongruous, to me.

Meanwhile, for deployment, presumably the people that did the deployment concealed how they did so, because if that had been known that would have revealed too much about how it worked -- leading to whatever Mordin did having been done.

Its a nuclear-equivalent of an infertility virus. A bioweapon meant as a political deterrence method of controlling a population.

In parts of why I sometimes use examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings when talking about the genophage. When the US nuke both cities, they don't directly attack the military itself which ravaged across asia pacific. The same applies to what happened to the Krogan when the Turians unleash the genophage, it doesn't affect directly to the actual krogan who was terrorizing the Citadel space, but to the people back home on Tuchanka who saw drastic stillbirths and infertility among the female population and the krogan military slowly lay down their weapons and soon became demilitarized.

Depending on your perspective, both genophage by the turians and atomic bombs by the US can be considered as war crimes, as they're both specifically targeting civilian population. US only got involved into WW2 after Pearl Harbor was attacked, the turians got involved into the Krogan Rebellion because the krogan threatened their own homeworld and both was acknowledged as a heroic and justifiable actions by both perpetrators because the end result favor the victors.

And the aftermath of both events still affect both affected population in long term and still in recovery.

Yes, the Salarian do have the capacity to reverse the genophage but as Mordin said, the genophage is an unpredictable cocktail and the krogan themselves have the natural ability to physically adapt and evolve accordingly (they mostly live in a nuclear wasteland anyway). In Genophage Modification Project, he have to create his own modification over the existing wild-type genophage strain by forcing a code that inhibit necessary hormones for fetal neural development so the babies ended up being born brain dead. In ME3, the 'Cure' doesn't effect both strains, rather it simulated the krogan capacity to adapt by artificially inducing immune organs to mutate and produce different hormones to enable viable birth. Thus circumvent the genophage and its modification's effects.

In layman term, the genophage is political. The Salarians doesn't think the Krogan deserve their species to expand because they are technically biologically immortal and by taking away their children, they still kept the krogan at a manageable state in case there's another intergalactic giant monster invasion that they couldn't handle. Even a thousand years old krogan is as battle ready as a young krogan, so there's no real need for new blood in the existing pool. Which is why most notable krogan you see seem to be perpetually violent, they're barely a generation or two from the krogan who fought the Rachni War and Krogan Rebellion.

Meanwhile on Tuchanka and MEA, younger krogans themselves are like equivalents to millennials. You seem most of them being merchants, engineers and scientists. Grunt and other test tube krogans doesn't count.

The quarians had settlements prior to the Morning War. I believe they lost those during the war. They tried to settle new worlds in Council space afterward but were denied. However, the Terminus Systems are outside of Council rule and we know for a fact that there are uncharted systems around. They merely had to look. Imagine if some enterprising quarian on Pilgrimage decided to go exploring and found a new colony world for his or her people. Imagine the accolades for it. But, nah, it's easier to go to Pilgrimage on Omega (god knows why) or some remote human colony instead. So, yeah, I kind of blame the quarians for not having a colony of their own.