Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. In August, three graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University were crammed together in a small, windowless basement lab, using a jury-rigged 3D printer frame to zap a slice of mouse brain with . In the future, U.S. forces may find themselves on the lagging side of the human augmentation. That is undoubtedly the agency's biggest success. One of the first Wuhan researchers reportedly sickened with Covid in fall 2019, Ben Hu, was getting U.S. financial support for risky gain-of-function research on coronaviruses . Blood pharming is the process of creating red blood cells from cell sources in a lab rather than inside a human body. But what happened actually is that DARPA creates, for instance, Agent Orange, the toxic defoliant that not only just, like, parched the Earth but also had, like, really toxic side effects not only for Vietnamese people but for American troops who were exposed to it and came back with mysterious symptoms that no one could diagnose and eventually were attributed to Agent Orange. And he thought, well, maybe we can mold this agency around the strategic threats that I see. One program in the DSO, called Persistence in Combat, addressed three areas that slowed soldiers down on the battlefield: pain, wounds, and excessive bleeding. At one point, they renamed it back to ARPA, looking at it, well, maybe it can be sort of an engine of civil innovation. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. A soldier wears a skullcap that stimulates his brain to make him learn skills faster, or reads his thoughts as a way to control a drone. A 2018 report from this years Mad Scientist conference, a future tech conference run by the U.S. Army, states that there are studies being conducted that explore the possibility of directly emulating those expert brain states with non-invasive EEG caps that could improve performance almost immediately. In other words, the term thinking cap is about to become more literal. This is most evident in genetic therapy when doctors add DNA containing a functional version of a lost or defective gene back into a cell. Soldiers having no physical, physiological, or cognitive limitation will be key to survival and operational dominance in the future, Goldblatt told his program managers a few weeks after his arrival. Speak to these people doing parapsychological work not just for the CIA but, you know, there was some work at universities. GROSS: That said, DARPA ended up doing some really exciting research and continues to do exciting research in neuroscience and neurotransmissions, neural implants. Science news this week: Asias tallest tree and mysterious brain spirals, 4,500-year-old 'Stonehenge' sanctuary discovered in the Netherlands, Earth's thermosphere reaches highest temperature in 20 years after being bombarded by solar storms. Unlike humans, they are somehow able to control the lobes of their left and right brains so that while one lobe sleeps, the opposite lobe stays awake, allowing the animal to swim. And so he basically said, look, you know, 9/11, terrorism is clearly going to be one of the number one if not the number-one threat facing the United States in the coming years. published 23 May 2019 (Image credit: Shutterstock) DARPA, the Department of Defense's research arm, is paying scientists to invent ways to instantly read soldiers' minds using tools like genetic. And so just as after 9/11 there was a push to sort of reorganize government to have the government respond - after 9/11 it was the creation of Department of Homeland Security - Eisenhower was under pressure to sort of reorganize things. Journalist Sharon Weinberger discusses the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, which develops innovative scientific technologies for the military. WEINBERGER: He literally did go to Vietnam. But it's really too soon. As one U.S. Navy report in 2015 noted: Major ethical concerns about the voluntary and reversible nature of such augmentations mean that it is more likely these enhancements will first gain traction in state and non-state forces that do not place as much weight on ethical concerns as our own., Every medical advance is now eyed for augmentation potential, and not just in the United States. He's WHYY's new manager of on-demand audio and podcasts. Capable of carrying 400 pounds, the LS3 is intended to deploy with an infantry squad. He pitched this to President Kennedy, who approved it. The agency also has fewer financial limitations, enabling it to invest in longshot projects with the hopes theyll pay off theyre basically the militarys innovative venture capitalists. Marshall, the U.S. Army combat historian during World War II. They began one of the most infamous projects in DARPA history: the quest for a mechanical elephant. Schifferle, at Calspan, told me, "We're at the 'walk' stage of a typical 'crawl, walk, run . The Subtle Mindset Shift That Could Radically Change the Way You See the World, Dear Therapist: I Dont Understand Why My Girlfriend Dumped Me, The Authoritarian Instincts of Police Unions, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency. WEINBERGER: Well, in fact, a lot of DARPA's Vietnam-era technology is used today along the U.S.-Mexican border. Goldblatt was a biologist and venture capitalist from the Midwest who, during the food-related national health scare that followed three childrens deaths from eating E. coli-contaminated hamburgers at Jack in the Box restaurants, became hyper-aware of pathogens. The objective of this effort, Eisenstadt explained, is to use remote teleoperation via direct interconnections with the brain. The bigger objective was to allow future soldiers [to] communicate by thought alone. They sponsored the development of the first stealth prototype aircraft in the 1970s. And that's the unfortunate part of DARPA, this tremendously successful research agency which isn't being used the way it was in its early days to address warfare. They were shocked. Copyright 2017 NPR. He met psychics and looked for, quote, "anything that worked.". But the real trick may not be granting superpowers, but rather making sure those effects are temporary. I told Larry how [the self-sterilizing packages] could be used in field hospitals or on the battlefield. How? It is also leading to - I mean, it's still very early days, but the idea of quadriplegics, of, quote, unquote, "locked-in" people who can operate computers just by thinking about moving the cursor or thinking about letters. An extreme example would be remote guidance or control of a human being. Other critics said that the quest to enhance human performance on the battlefield would lead scientists down a morally dangerous path. Harm Venhuizen is an editorial intern at Military Times. GROSS: Was President Reagan a little naive about the science that it would take to create the Star Wars defense shield that he was promoting and made it seem like this is really within reach? So the irony of what happened with that program was that George Lawrence, the DARPA program manager who was responsible for, you know, meeting the witches and psychics, you know, he was brought in 'cause he kind of was part of this. DARPA, to its credit, is keenly aware of potential misuse of remote brain control. The Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems program was run by teams from the University of Michigan and Cornell University. DARPA also invests in researching space travel. And so when DARPA over the past three or four years got back involved in neuroscience, the language was couched very differently. He had been at DARPA prior to that. Reagan had not consulted with him, had not listened to them when they were saying this is not feasible. But what quickly happened is that there's always a difference between sort of the technology ideas and the political strategy. DARPA - Wikipedia One of the most shocking things about the Star Wars history was that he hadn't even, you know, before making his announcement, he hadn't even consulted or listened to the top people in the Pentagon. So the war in Vietnam ends, the Cold War ends and DARPA has had to figure out its place in the U.S. in the era of terrorism. GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. You know, it sort of for a few months seemed to go along fine. And he came up with this way to end our show. Exoskeletons over implants, for example. And he looked at countries like the Philippines and particularly the Vietnam. One would be a black program, meaning a heavily classified program in data analysis. A grant proposal written by the U.S.-based nonprofit the EcoHealth Alliance and submitted in 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, provides evidence that the group was. Things were not going well for the agency. Bring me anything that works. Let Your Robots Off The Leash - Or Lose: AI Experts DARPA, the Department of Defense's research arm, is paying scientists to invent ways to instantly read soldiers' minds using tools like genetic engineering of the human brain, nanotechnology and infrared beams. And the president said, oh, I know. And then Uri, just by having the signal through his mind, would try to redraw what the person had drawn. The program was successful in decreasing the cost of synthetic blood from over $90,000 down to under $5,000 per unit, a 2013 press release stated, but new information has not been released since, and the program was not listed in recent budget documents. Other programs explored other questions. But what they kept, at least in the early days, was a secondary mission in missile defense. The LS3 is experimental technology being tested by the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab during Rim of the Pacific 2014. And he was dubious of the work, but he thought, you know, this is an area where OK, DARPA could be sort of the truth squad in it. What is the maximum number of biological parents an organism can have? And he thought the most likely way the United States would confront the Soviet Union would be through the sort of proxy wars, where the United States would have - would back regimes fighting Communist insurgencies. The Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies program is tasked with creating an implanted, closed-loop diagnostic and therapeutic system for treating, and possibly even curing, neuropsychiatric illness, according to a DARPA press release. The question becomes when such efforts cross the line into human enhancement. Some researchers cite anything above a baseline human as augmentation. The US military is looking into ways to hack the human brain to enhance soldiers' cognitive abilities. In addition to the great professional actors John has used, he's drawn on the extraordinary acting talents of the FRESH AIR family. Gene editing equipment has drown drastically cheaper and easier to use in recent years, putting those tools within reach of well-funded non-government actors such as terrorist groups and drug cartels. So one of the earliest projects that came out of DARPA was a project called Seesaw, which was a particle beam that was going to blast, you know, nuclear weapons out of space. "Being able to decode or encode sensory experiences is something we understand relatively well," Robinson said. The question of reversibility steers a lot of the debate over human augmentation. WEINBERGER: I have two thoughts on that. Stay up to date on the latest science news by signing up for our Essentials newsletter. And yet we're still spending money on it. They were not working with real world data. If this could be achieved, an enemys need for sleep would put him at an extreme disadvantage.