Wired Science and several other outlets have picked up a story about DARPA research with the apparent aim of alarming without truly informing. Apparently, as part of an announced budget for next year, DARPA — the far-out research wing of the U.S. military — is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, whose aim is to create “immortal” engineered “lab-monsters” (what type of organism isn’t specified) that have a built-in virtual “serial number” and an emergency “kill switch.” It’s hard to evaluate what exactly is being proposed, but the tone of the coverage strikes me as drummed-up alarmism.
The blog In Pursuit of Happiness contains the actual excerpt from the budget, and the description there sounds pretty much like many definitions of plain old synthetic biology — “eliminating the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement primarily by advanced genetic engineering and molecular biology technologies to produce the intended biological effect.”
There’s not much truly new here — kill switches and molecular markers already exist, and “increasing resistance to cell death” really just seems to mean creating a biological system that is sustainable. I don’t really think there’s anything to see here, folks. DARPA has been interested in synthetic biology as long as the nascent field has had a name, and in addition to the $6 million for BioDesign, it is investing $20 million into a new synthetic biology program and $7.5 million into “increasing by several decades the speed with which we sequence, analyze and functionally edit cellular genomes.”
One Comment
Thanks for this. It’s easy to get caught up in the hysteria. What struck me as the most scary/morally ambiguous was the apparent desire to transfer this kind of technology into “soldiers.” I don’t want to live in a world where the US government can make immortal people and then kill them when they outgrow their usefulness. I don’t think it will happen (especially not with just $20 million), but I’m also kind of scared to live in a country where people who think this *would* be a good idea are in charge of anything! I don’t know how much of it is actually true of course, I may just be succumbing to the mass internet hysteria too.
Post a Comment