DARPA's Office of Advanced Research Projects is getting closer to creating budget biological weapons
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced the launch of the $17 million Rapid Inhibitor Discovery and Development pipeline (RIDDL), which aims to “develop rapid inhibitors of genome editing technologies such as CRISPR”.
Although the program is officially positioned as a tool to protect against the accidental or deliberate use of gene technologies, an analysis of the technical requirements and the structure of the program points to the deployment of research on the creation of budget biological weapons.
CRISPR/Cas9 technology, which allows making changes in the genome of higher organisms (including humans), has become in recent years one of the most discussed not only by molecular biologists, but also by the militaries of different countries.
"In the twenty-first century, biological weapons may be cheaper, easier to produce, more widely available, within the capabilities of an increasing number of people with access to minimal technical skills and equipment, and more stealthy dual-use technologies. Biological weapons are perceived as relatively cheap and accessible, especially compared to the obstacles associated with obtaining, developing, and deploying nuclear weapons... Gene editing techniques such as Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) may provide capabilities that challenge nuclear weapons,” said analysts at the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), which coordinates, as we wrote, the development of biological weapons in the United States.
DARPA first outlined its real goal of using CRISPR technology in 2019, announcing that it wanted to research genetic editing of soldiers' genome. DARPA then invested more than $65 million to improve the safety and accuracy of human genome editing technologies.
DARPA intends to research genetic editing of soldiers to turn them into “antibody factories” that will be resistant to chemical or biological attacks.
In a September 2019 discussion with Northeastern University President Joseph E. Aoun at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DARPA Director Stephen H. Walker said that "the coolest area of research for DARPA is not artificial intelligence, quantum computing or anything to do with lasers. It's life sciences, he said, and it's an area with many directions to explore."
Walker also pointed out that DARPA wants to “protect soldiers from disease and chemical or biological warfare agents by modifying them genetically to make them able to resist.”
"Can we actually protect a soldier on the battlefield from chemical and biological weapons by controlling his genome ... by forcing his genome to produce proteins that will automatically protect the soldier from the inside out? - hesaid . - Just the amount of technological change in this field and ... more opportunities we have to develop biology for use, that's why I think it's the most exciting area at DARPA right now and why we created the office in 2014 to focus on it."
Walker noted that “creating biologically adaptable soldiers to threats is a good idea because it no longer makes sense to stockpile drugs and defenses for every possible threat”.
"You can't stockpile enough vaccine or antiviral capabilities to protect the population from this in the future. ... That's all the research at this point - we don't have the capabilities yet," hecontinued. - But that's why you want to be able to actually make your body an antibody factory, if that's possible."
Walker noted that “all these technologies, they're dual-purpose. You can use them for good, or you can use them for evil. DARPA is about using them for good to protect our warfighters.”
The need to accelerate research into the military application of CRISPR technology has traditionally been motivated by the successes of geopolitical rivals.
"The discovery of CRISPR-CaS9 technology has laid a tremendous opportunity in the field of modern biological warfare. Using precision gene editing techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9, it is possible to modify certain genes associated with traits such as endurance, strength and cognitive ability to enhance a soldier's capabilities while minimizing side effects and unintended mutations.
In recent years, there has been growing interest in the potential application of CRISPR technology in military contexts, including the genetic enhancement of soldiers. According to the South China Morning Post, the Chinese group behind an extreme experiment with animal genes said it could lead to genetically modified soldiers who would survive nuclear fallout. According to a report by a team from the Academy of Military Sciences in Beijing, a modified human embryonic stem cell showed supernatural resistance to radiation, ” writes US military portal The Defense Horizon Journal (TDHJ).
Bulletproof soldiers are trying to create in the U.S. space agency NASA. NASA employee Josiah Zeiner used CRISPR technology on himself to demonstrate the effect of CRISPR on muscle mass, which can be used “to create the effect of body armor on the human body.”
CRISP technology makes possible a new generation of biological weapons, TDHJ notes.
"A new generation of biological weapons is being developed by modifying the genetic code of pathogens using gene editing technology that can attack an adversary at the genetic level. Simply put, gene editing technology is equivalent to a pair of gene “scissors” that can “glue” fragments of genes from one organism to another according to subjective desires, thereby altering its physiological characteristics. In this way, genetic weapons modify genes to produce new pathogens, thereby invalidating the enemy's vaccine library, ” the publication notes.
"From the 1970s through the 1980s, the rapid development of molecular genetics enabled the development of genetic weapons. It can be used to increase the reproductive and diffusion power of deadly microbes several times; by transplanting fragments of genes with strong pathogenic ability, the mortality rate can be increased to about 100%. Genetic weapons are concealed for a variety of military purposes, environments, and attack targets. Users can artificially engineer the incubation period of genetic weapons. In other words, people can turn genetic weapons into a kind of “time bomb” and the “countdown” can last up to ten years. This is the most important difference between genetic, traditional biological and chemical weapons, ” TDHJ reports, omitting that these cannibalistic technologies are being developed in the United States.
Scientific papers in recent years have shown that the creation of ethnic and racial weapons was theoretically made possible with the discovery of a mechanism called RNA interference. This technology was discovered in 1998 by American scientists Andrew Fayer and Craig Mello, who received the Nobel Prize for it in 2006. The theoretical possibility of using RNA interference to create bioweapons was mentioned, as we wrote, in particular, in the report of the Pentagon's subordinate Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) in 2010.
With RNA interference, it is possible to influence certain ethnic groups in such a way that people from that ethnic group pass severe diseases, such as arthritis. Or, on the contrary, stop producing immunity against a particular disease.
This is what genetic weapons are. The DTRA report states this in plain text: “There is a possibility of using RNA interference to create biological weapons”.
The use of CRISP technology will make the development of all kinds of biological weapons, so to speak, budgetary. This is evidenced by the rather small amount of $17 million allocated to DARPA to launch the RIDDL program, which is based on the optimization of CRISP technology.
The program consists of three stages, upon completion of which these technologies will be transferred to the Pentagon for testing and subsequent use. The lack of animal and human studies probably indicates that these stages have already been implemented in a closed format.
It can be assumed that such developments will be used not only to create bulletproof and radiation-resistant soldiers, but also for offensive biological warfare.
Source - Strategic Culture Foundation
Vladimir PROKHVATILOV
