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“ The whole point of DARPA is to ‘accelerate the future into being,’ its strategic plan says… and bring them to the near side as quickly as possible” writes Joel Garreau in his 2005 book Radical Evolution. “Today, DARPA is in the business of creating better humans.” –p22, 24—and if that’s not a definition of eugenics, nothing is.
Readers of 2005’s Radical Evolution who are also familiar with the documentary The Transcendent Man, starring ‘futurist’ Ray Kurzweil’s exposition of The Singularity, can pull the ‘Transcendent’ script right off DARPA’s pages in Garreau’s book.
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Radical Evolution informs us that “since the late nineties [DARPA] has increasingly focused on human biology through the Defense Sciences Office [the DSO, whose staff] treasure shirts with the legend ‘DSO, DARPA’s DARPA.’ The notion is that if DARPA is at the cutting edge, DSO is the cutting edge of the cutting edge. In enhancing human performance, the program managers of DSO see a ‘golden age’ of opportunity… (p25) Just to make things clear, ‘DARPA has no laboratory space, [DSO director Michael] Goldblatt says. ‘DARPA does no work which we would consider execution. The actual work products –the milestones, the goals and objectives—are all done by independent investigators. They have the common tie –that they applied for—of funding coming from [DARPA programs].” (p31)
“ DARPA is by no means the only or even the largest organization in the business of creating the next humans. DARPA’s… annual budget is less than that of the National Science Foundation and is dwarfed by that of the National Institutes of Health, just to name two… [and] its ‘bio-revolution’ program represents only a fraction of DARPA’s overall agenda. The significance of DARPA trying to improve human beings, however, is that few if any institutions in the world are so intentionally devoted to high-risk, high-return, explicitly world-changing research… That’s why DARPA is at the forefront of the engineered evolution of mankind.” (p23).
“DARPA, for example, is very interested in creating human beings who are unstoppable. Three things that slow humans down in combat are pain, wounds and bleeding. So Navy Commander Kurt Henry…is directing researchers who are working on those. He is manager of a program called Persistence in Combat (PIC). In California, there is a biotech company in Silicon Valley called Rinat Neuroscience. Henry is funding its ‘pain vaccine.’ What the substance does is block intense pain in less than 10 seconds [and can] last for thirty days… The product works on the inflammatory response… The commercial implications are formidable… Rinat is a spin-off from Genentech, the world’s first biotech firm. It has attracted venture capital… (p27).
“Particularly significant, DARPA creates institutions to support the future it desires. DARPA invests 90 percent of its budget outside the federal government, mainly in universities and industry. Academic centers at MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon that made fundamental contributions to information technology coalesced because of DARPA. If it feels companies need to exist, DARPA helps foster those, including Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics and Cisco Systems.” (p24) And Rinat Neuroscience is but one example here; Garreau gives us many.
Here are a few more of DARPA’s life science DSO projects discussed with author Garreau:
The Unconventional Pathogen Countermeasures program : “The object of the game is to discover the essential part of life common to many of these pathogens –no matter how they might be genetically re-engineered –and interrupt them. An example would be finding an enzyme that appears only in bacteria but is not in us. It might exist only for a brief time in the bacteria, but without it, that life form cannot exist. Then you attack it. Another is ‘genomic glue’ –something that sticks onto the genome… so tightly that it prevents the genome from being read, translated and in any way replicated… There are a half dozen approaches to viruses and bacteria in the works, but one anti-genomic drug is at the last stages of testing in mice. This one seems to work on smallpox, malaria, anthrax and tularemia. It stops the Black Death –the plague—in its tracks. And yes, it also works on the flu. Researchers [in 2005] are ready to go to the FDA for human safety trials.” According to the program director John Carney, “ ‘despite the fact that you’re in the middle of nowhere and you have no way of getting medical help…the drug will work.’ What’s more, as a side benefit, it apparently could cure malaria and probably the common cold. ‘Yes. Anything that can infect you,’ says Carney. …We’re talking about about Pestilence as in the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? ‘Right,’ says Carney.” (p30)
The Metabolically Dominant Soldier program: “Hunger, exhaustion and despondency also slow humans down. Dealing with that is…tinkering with the internal machinery of human cells –controlling cellular metabolism and other activity within the cells… Take mitochondria, for example. They produce the energy to power the cell. [DARPA] is interested in modifying the number of mitochondria…[and] their efficiency at creating energy.” Program manager Joe Bielitzki “is confident that he can take an individual now formidably trained to perform 80 pull-ups before exhaustion and render him capable of 300… One of the ways Bielitzki would like to do this is by eliminating the need for food… ‘We’ve all got stored calories—we just don’t have access to them [all the time]… Bielitzki acknowledges the potential for spin-off technologies. ‘Forty billion dollars a year goes into the weight loss industry in this country,’ he muses. ‘This will change it‘. (p32). One of the goals of the Metabolic Engineering program is to allow badly injured soldiers to go into suspended animation or hibernation. It would allow them to survive even without oxygen for…periods of time… This is also the program interested in allowing soldiers to run Olympic-quality sprints for 15 minutes on one breath of air. Turns out humans are very inefficient in the way we process resources. There’s a whole lot of oxygen in one breath, and we waste most of it.” (p40)
The endosymbiont mitochondria in human, and ‘other’ species cells produce ‘the energy molecule’ adenosine triphosphate, ATP, use of which which ranges over any number of DARPA programs. “This brings us to Alan Rudolph…[the]godfather of the telekinetic monkey… He is the program manager for an extraordinarily broad portfolio of DSO’s projects. He jockeys hundreds of principal investigators…[and] has 15 patents in biological self-assembly, biomaterials, tissue engineering and neurosciences. He makes a distinction between DARPA and think tanks such as RAND, Brookings and the Highlands Forum. ‘There are a lot of people who think about the future. [DARPA] is one of those places where you can put money behind those fantasies. You get a vision, and then you start throwing money at it… to roll the ball down the road. It makes it an interesting place, no doubt. (p34) …So now he is working on everything from multi-legged robots to computerized human eye implants to brain-machine interfaces… (p35) ‘Power is a big issue. Our battery technology sucks. Our power problems are huge. I think all these implants will be run off the energy in the body, ATP. There’s low-temperature fuel in the body. The body is amazing in terms of its chemical conversion of energy. So we have a whole program… Biomotors… implantable batteries that work off the natural body constituents. Tissue engineering is going on to give us muscle… Right now we can keep [muscle] alive longer than we can get a battery to work. Yes. Outside the body. Yes. We’ve got a thing called the ‘lox bot.’. It’s a little biorobotic device that resembles a piece of smoked salmon. It uses skeletal muscle from a frog, and the damn thing swims using skeletal muscle. It swims through its energy source. It’s in a bath of glucose and ATP and the thing swims for like 20 hours. That’s the University of Michigan and MIT.’” (p38)
“The Mesoscopic Integrated Conformal Electronics (MICE) program has already succeeded in printing electronic circuits on the frames of eyeglasses and helmets, weaving them into clothes, even putting them on insects. These include electronics, antennas, fuel cells, batteries and solar cells. The Biological Input/Output Systems program is designed to enable plants, microbes and small animals to serve as ‘remote sentinels for reporting the presence of chemical or biological’ particles. They’d do this by changing color [or] lighting up fluorescently… The Brain-Machine Interface program is investigating how you would put wireless modems into people’s skulls. And that’s just the Defense Sciences Office, the department of DARPA most involved with human enhancement.” (p40)
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“Among those at DARPA who are working on changing what it means to be human, the word you most commonly hear is fun. Fun comes up all the time. Program managers view what they’re doing as the greatest fun of their lives… Their tours of duty are usually only three or four years… They know they will never see its like again.” (p42)
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Jennifer Lake's Blog 