by Joel Garreau
Take young Billy Batson, for example. He was a Depression-era orphan who sold newspapers on the street and slept in the subway. One night, he was led to a subterranean cavern and introduced to an ancient Egyptian wizard. For 3,000 years this mage had battled evil with the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles and the speed of Mercury. Hence his name, S-H-A-Z-A-M. Knowing Billy to be virtuous, and realizing it was his time to pass, Shazam anointed the youth with his abilities. By uttering the sorcerer’s name, Billy could become the grown-up Captain Marvel, with powers that included super strength. He could leap great distances and repel bullets with his body.
In today’s terms, Billy Batson is no fantasy. He’s somebody who’s got hold of the nanotech Future Warrior exoskeleton—think of it as a wearable robot suit with superhuman strength—now in development as part of a $50 million program for the U.S. Army at Natick Labs in collaboration with MIT.
Or take the story of the sickly Steven Rogers, who lived in Depression poverty with his widowed mother, Sarah. She died overworking herself to provide for her son, leaving him to survive as a delivery boy. Alarmed by the rise of Nazism, Rogers decided to join the military but was deemed “too frail.” After begging to be accepted, Rogers was tapped for Operation Rebirth, given a “secret serum” and subjected to a rain of “vita-rays.” The weakling was reborn as Captain America, who could lift over a quarter of a ton and run 30 miles per hour, with reflexes 10 times as fast as normal.
Nowadays, his treatment would be called gene doping, a biotechnology already successful in lab animals and one that Olympic committees fear will make its human debut well before the 2008 Olympic games in China.
Throughout the cohort of yesterday’s superheroes—from Spider-Man to the Shadow, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men—one sees the outlines of technologies that today either exist or are now in engineering. The Green Lantern has a ring that can create any physical object out of little but his imagination and an energy source. (He has a nanotech assembler—imagine a computer printer that can create any object from its constituent atoms.) Superman has telescopic and X-ray vision. (This is current military technology, from reconnaissance robots to cave pingers.)
In the middle of the 20th century, the powers of these superheroes were dreams. Today, we are entering a world in which such abilities are either yesterday’s news or tomorrow’s headlines. What’s more, the ability to create this magic is accelerating. In 1985, the human genome was thought to be a code that would resist being cracked until 2010 or 2020. When the feat was accomplished in 2001 at a fraction of the estimated price, it was no more surprising than was the cascade of cloned mice, cats, rabbits, pigs and cattle that followed the first cloned sheep. Who is not braced for the first renegade human clone?
What will this mean? Will human nature itself change? Will we soon pass some point where we are so altered by our imaginations and inventions as to be unrecognizable to Shakespeare or the writers of the ancient Greek plays?
Many are trying to envision such a world. They describe our children and children’s children as no longer really being like us. They call them transhuman or posthuman. They see our lives changing more dramatically in the next few decades than in all of recorded history. Who knows? They may be right.
After all, how many in the early 21st century expected an American soldier in Asia to display supernatural powers by shining a little red light on a target, confident that soon that laser would cause missiles precisely to vaporize the tank he had illuminated?
Shazam!
THERE ARE VERY FEW organizations in the world that routinely look as far forward as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It regularly thinks—and funds—20 and 40 years out. It’s already changed your life. In the early sixties, there was no field of computer science. There were no computer science departments in universities and certainly no computer networks, much less personal computers. That’s when J.C.R. Licklider—director of command and control research for the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA’s ancestral organization—envisioned something he called the Intergalactic Computer Network. He imagined it as an electronic commons open to all, “the main and essential medium of informational interaction for governments, institutions, corporations, and individuals.” On this Intergalactic Computer Network, people using computers at home would be able to make purchases, do banking, search libraries, get investment and tax advice, and participate in cultural, sport and entertainment activities, he believed.
By the late 1960s, such prescience would inspire those who followed Licklider at ARPA to fire up a halting, primitive version of his Intergalactic Computer Network. They called it the Arpanet. This was a decade before the first commercial personal computer. In the 1970s, they expanded it into a network of networks.
You now know it, of course, as the Internet.
Today, DARPA is in the business of creating better humans.
“Soldiers having no physical, physiological, or cognitive limitations will be key to survival and operational dominance in the future,” Goldblatt once told a gathering of prospective researchers at an event called DARPATech. “Indeed, imagine if soldiers could communicate by thought alone. . . . Imagine the threat of biological attack being inconsequential. And contemplate, for a moment, a world in which learning is as easy as eating, and the replacement of damaged body parts as convenient as a fast-food drive-through. As impossible as these visions sound or as difficult you might think the task would be, these visions are the everyday work of the Defense Sciences Office. The Defense Sciences Office is about making dreams into reality. . . . These bold visions and amazing achievements . . . have the potential to profoundly alter our world. . . . It is important to remember we are talking about science action, not science fiction.”
DARPA is by no means the only or even the largest organization in the business of creating the next humans. DARPA’s publicly acknowledged $3 billion 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 near the nation’s capital. For that matter, 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. The cast at DARPA does not have kind words for incremental research. DARPA’s “only charter is radical innovation,” its strategic plan says. The swagger at DARPA is that of players who always go for the long ball, even at the risk of frequently striking out. Its program managers actively seek out problems they call “DARPA-esque” or “DARPA-hard.” These are challenges verging on the impossible. “We try not to violate any of the laws of physics,” says DSO’s deputy director, Steve Wax. “Or at least not knowingly,” adds Goldblatt. “Or at least not more than one per program.”
The reason they reach that far is because they believe that’s where they might find earthshaking results. That’s why it becomes common to hear, wherever areas of astounding human transformation are discussed, “Oh, DARPA is working on that.” That’s why DARPA is at the forefront of the engineered evolution of mankind.
DARPA has a track record. Not only did it pioneer the Internet and e-mail, but DARPA helped fund the computer mouse, the computer graphics industry, very-large-scale integrated circuits, computers that recognize human speech and translate languages, the computer workstation, reduced-instruction-set computing, the Berkeley Unix operating system, massively parallel processing and head-mounted displays. It was a key player in the global positioning system, the cell phone, “own-the-night” night-vision sensors, weather satellites, spy satellites and the Saturn V rocket, which got humans to the moon. It also helped to create supercapacitors, advanced fuel cells leading to the next generation of cars and telesurgery. All of the military’s airplanes, missiles, ships and vehi
cles, including the materials and processes and armor that went into them, and especially everything with the word stealth as part of its name, has “DARPA inside.” Various ray guns, including laser, particle-beam and electromagnetic-pulse weapons, started with DARPA. So did the M16 rifle. Then there are the legions of air, land and sea robots, including the Predator, which, when it successfully fired a Hellfire missile at an al-Qaeda leader’s SUV in Yemen in 2002, had the distinction of becoming arguably the first robot known to incinerate a human being.
The whole point of DARPA is to “accelerate the future into being,” its strategic plan says—to identify discoveries now on the far side of usefulness and bring them to the near side as quickly as possible. One program manager, in his DARPA job interview, was asked to describe where he thought science would be in 20 years. Then he was asked whether he would like to try to make it happen in three.
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. If standards need to exist, DARPA sometimes steps in, too, promoting, for example, Unix, and the TCP/IP protocol that is the foundation of the Internet.
President Eisenhower created DARPA after the shock of Sputnik. Americans believed the United States’ Cold War adversary had seized “the ultimate high ground.” The military wanted to seize back the lead. But most of all it wanted never again to be surprised by the technological advances of potential adversaries.
As a result, DARPA’s brag list starts with space. (NASA was spun off from DARPA.) Today’s list is heavily loaded toward the information industries, because that’s where the payoff has been in the past few decades. But just as DARPA in the mid-eighties began to invest heavily in biologically inspired robots, since the late nineties it has increasingly focused on human biology through the Defense Sciences Office. Goldblatt describes human enhancement as “our future historical strength”—what DSO and DARPA will be known for.
The denizens of the Defense Sciences Office 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 for radical, high-risk, high-reward change. As Goldblatt puts it, the old Army slogan “‘Be All You Can Be’ takes on a new dimension.”
DARPA is headquartered across the Potomac from the District of Columbia in Arlington, Virginia, convenient to the Pentagon. Its neighborhood should be considered impressive. Within blocks are the vast digs of the National Science Foundation, the campus of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Arlington grounds of George Mason University. Nonetheless, the area comes off as cheesy. It remains punctuated by low-rent medical centers, a funeral home, a storefront where you can learn ballroom dancing and an International House of Pancakes with a spectacularly garish blue roof. These are the remnants of not long ago, when Arlington was a shabby inner suburb. Today it is an increasingly trendy and thriving collection of edge cities. Nonetheless, it will take more bulldozing before a transition to physically distinguished is anywhere near complete.
DARPA is housed in a substantial 10-story building with a sort of male, burgundy marble façade, smoked glass windows and an outdoor plaza that sounds hollow when your heel hits it because of a parking cavern below. Headquarters, nonetheless, is easy to miss. There are no signs advertising the tenant. It blends so thoroughly with the other blocky office buildings in the area that it is possible to miss the turn even on the fourth visit. The landmark to watch for is the uncommon number of police cars, marked and unmarked, guarding the place.
In the visitor control center, three guards in blazers process guests, while two more stand behind them, beneath a fashionably designed lighting array with “DARPA” backlit in aqua. On the coffee table phone is a red sign. It reads: “Do not discuss classified information. This telephone is subject to monitoring at all times. Use of this telephone constitutes consent to monitoring.” One day, a high-ranking, uniformed aide accompanied retired admiral John Poindexter into visitor control. The aide asked the guards if he could stash the admiral’s bag in the visitor center for a short time. The look of fierce incredulity on the part of the guards was so sufficient an answer that the aide hurriedly gathered up the bag.
At the elevators, the guards are conspicuously armed. Outside, if you seem headed in a direction the guards don’t like, unmarked cars head you off. Visitors are escorted even to the men’s room. Actually, security there has been relaxed—the guides no longer have to accompany you into the can. Now, they are relieved to report, they can just wait for you outside.
This buttoned-up environment contrasts sharply with the spirit on the fifth floor. Goldblatt, the leader of the Defense Sciences Office, is a quick, curly-haired elf with strikingly long blond eyelashes. He compares his program managers to Jason and the Argonauts. It’s an interesting choice.
Jason and the crew of the Argo were among the first legendary explorers in human myth. Tales have been told about them now for 3,300 years. They were the greatest pioneers ever to light out for the Territory. They included Amphiaraus, the seer; Atalanta of Calydon, the virgin huntress and only woman; Caeneus the Lapith, who had once been a woman; Calais, the winged son of Boreas, the north wind; Heracles of Tiryns (Hercules), the strongest man who ever lived and the only human to be granted immortality among the gods; Periclymenus, the shape-shifting son of Poseidon who could take any form in battle; and 44 more. These ancient Greeks set sail when most of the eastern Mediterranean was an unknown realm full of inexplicable gods and monsters and witches. They met every challenge and faced every unknown. They performed impossible feats. Jason yoked two fire-breathing bulls to plow the field of Ares, sowed it with dragon’s teeth from which armed men immediately sprouted, defeated that army single-handedly, and then got past a loathsome and immortal dragon of a thousand coils, larger than the Argo itself, to snatch the Golden Fleece of a magic ram.
We still celebrate what their story says about human nature. Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery, the first Americans to traverse what would become the United States, echo the same myth. Take a close look at the bridge of the Enterprise in Star Trek. That’s Jason and the Argonauts rendered in modern terms.
Heavy company. Nonetheless, of his crew, Goldblatt proclaims, “We do not fear the unknown, and we relish exploring the unknowable.” And who knows—history may not view his comparison as preposterous. For his program managers have been handed the keys to all creation and asked if they would like to take it out for a spin.
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, a tall, dark, muscular, mustached and affable physician who radiates the cool of a movie leading man, is directing researchers who are working on those. He is the 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. Its effects last for 30 days. It doesn’t stifle your reactions. If you touch a hot stove, you still have the initial shock; your hand will still automatically jerk away. But after that, the torment is gone. The product works on the inflammatory response that is responsible for the majority of subacute pain. If you get shot, you feel the bullet, but after that, the inflammation and swelling that trigger agony are substantially reduced. The company has already hit its first milestones in animal testing and is preparing reports for scientific conferences. The commercial implications are formidable.
If you were to get $400 per dose for a quarter million troops, there’s your first $100 million. Rinat is a spin-off from Genentech, the world’s first biotech firm. It has attracted venture capital funding; an initial public offering is expected soon. This product could revolutionize pain management. Think what it could do for cancer patients.
Blinded rats are being made to see by Harry Whelan, a professor of neurology at the Medical College of Wisconsin. In a battlefield, a laser powerful enough to burn is a very lethal thing if it is aimed at pilots’ eyes. Using light in the near-infrared spectrum, however, in a process called photo-biomodulation, wound healing is accelerated. Vision in rats is being largely restored in anywhere from 5 to 24 hours—not yet quick enough to help pilots, but this is a work in progress. The research is sufficiently advanced that it is about to be tried on monkeys. The hope is that it will also mend wounds to skin, bone, neurons, cartilage, ligaments and tendons within four days. Whelan is also exploring what the process might do for spinal cord injuries, Parkinson’s disease and brain tumors, as well as tissue and organ regeneration. If it works, he will have created something akin to the “physiostimulator” of the original Star Trek, the curative device Bones waves over injuries to heal them. The Navy SEALs are deeply interested in that.
Henry is also directing a gaggle of researchers who have discovered that the natural chemical cascades in the body that stop bleeding can be triggered by signals from the brain. The implication of this is that you might be able to train people to stop hemorrhaging within minutes, simply by concentrating their mind on their wound. Henry is directing another group of researchers who have discovered that if you inject millions of microscopic magnets into a creature and then wave a wand over them to get them all to point in the same direction, that can stop bleeding.