by Joel Garreau
Those are not the most challenging of Henry’s programs, however. That one would be Regenesis. Regenesis starts with the observation that if you cut off the tail of a tadpole, the tail will regrow. If you cut off an appendage of an adult frog, however, it won’t. This raises the question of what mechanism has been shut off in the adult frog. If you could answer that question, you might be able to figure out what mechanism in humans has been shut off that prevents us from regrowing a blown-off hand or a breast removed in a mastectomy. “We had it; we lost it; we need to find it again” is Henry’s slogan. As one of his principal investigators, Robert Fitzsimmons, points out, it is possible to grow an entire human from only a few cells. Every human ever conceived demonstrates that. So why can’t you regrow an arm? What are the rules? And if you think the answer to that question will be available in a thousand years, the next question is, why not now?
You ask Henry if he is modeling his program after the lines in Macbeth:
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
His response is—no, not particularly, why do you ask?
Did you know that dolphins and whales never sleep? At least not the way we do. They can’t. They’re mammals. If they slept, they’d drown. What they have evolved instead is an ability to allow only one portion of their brain to sleep at a time. While the right lobe sleeps, the left lobe is on guard. Then they switch brains. What would happen if humans could control which portion of their brain is working while another portion recharges? The goal of the Continuous Assisted Performance (CAP) program, managed by John Carney, is to find out.
“As combat systems become more sophisticated and reliable, the major limiting factor for operational dominance in a conflict is the warfighter,” the CAP mission statement says. “Eliminating the need for sleep during an operation, while maintaining the high level of both cognitive and physical performance of the individual, will create a fundamental change in warfighting. . . . The capability to resist the mental and physiological effects of sleep deprivation will fundamentally change current military concepts of ‘operational tempo.’”
The plan is to create a “24/7” soldier—one who can easily navigate, communicate and make good decisions for a week without sleep. Any enemy who does have to sleep would be at a profound disadvantage. Small groups of sleep-free warriors could run rings around much larger forces. Logistics would fundamentally change. This is no small deal. Military savants like to say, “Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics.” The Marines call the supply of “beans, bullets, and Band-Aids”—food, ammunition and medical supplies—a major limit to battle. If they were provided on a true round-the-clock basis, especially when the military is flying them from North Carolina to wherever the battle is, it changes a lot of equations. (Think of the equations that might be changed for civilians working for Federal Express. Think what this will do for college students and medical residents pulling all-nighters for a week.)
“In short, the capability to operate effectively, without sleep, is no less than a 21st century revolution in military affairs that results in operational dominance,” the mission statement says.
Carney is pink-skinned and soft, with gold wire-framed glasses. He somehow manages to look like a plumber, which he is, in a neuropharmacological sort of way. He holds over 150 patents. The Silicon Valley company he founded, Centaur Pharmaceuticals, commercializes his research on stroke medication. It now has several drugs in phase two and three clinical trials, meaning they may soon come to market.
“Through evolution certain species have already solved the problem of how not to sleep; they actually don’t care about sleep,” he notes. Yet what happens in humans is that “after 24 hours you start getting a little bit irritable, by 48 hours you’re frankly irritable and not fun to be around, and you’re making bad judgment calls. But if you happen to have stars on your shoulder”—if you’re a general—“nobody’s going to challenge you. You’re still going to be out there at the command center making bad decisions and nobody’s going to come up to you and tell you that you’re making bad decisions because you’ll bark at them. And then by 72 hours you’re frankly not useful for anybody. Even though you’re still standing.”
CAP’s major research efforts include preventing or reversing changes in the brain caused by sleep deprivation; expanding available memory space within the brain, especially short-term memory; and developing problem-solving circuits within the brain that are sleep-resistant. As it happens, finding out how to redirect function from one pathway in the brain to another also has enormous potential for civilians with Alzheimer’s, stroke and brain damage.
Another program of Carney’s is Unconventional Pathogen Countermeasures. The point is, for example, to “take anthrax off the table” as a threat, as Carney puts it. Also smallpox. What’s unconventional about it is that “despite the fact that you’re in the middle of nowhere and you have no way of getting medical help to diagnose what you’ve got, 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. “It’s not going to cure Alzheimer’s disease or arthritis. But anything that came from the living world that can cause disease in you.”
We’re talking about Pestilence as in the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?
“Right,” says Carney.
And you’re going to knock that baby right out of its—?
“Yes,” Carney continues.
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 reengineered—and interrupt them. An example would be finding an enzyme that appears only in bacteria but not in us. It might exist only for a very 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 of the pathogen so tightly that it prevents the genome from being read, translated and in any way replicated. It’s like laying logs on a train track. Nothing in the cell gets through. The nice part, so far, is that the bugs have not been able to develop resistance to the treatment no matter how hard the researchers have tried to induce it. There are half a 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 are ready to go to the FDA for human-safety trials. They hope the substance will be stockpiled against biological warfare, for which no clinical trials are ethically possible.
Will these approaches throw out some side effect that makes them unusable? If we were to tamper with the ecology of bugs in our system, killing off whole classes of them, might a potentially explosive Darwinian niche be opened into which all kinds of fearful unknowns might pour?
“It’s like wildcatting for oil,” says Carney. “It’s a high-reward, high-risk environment.”
“This is a paradigm shift, yes,” Carney says. He’s interested in making your immune system invulnerable. “One of the things that DARPA does historically is get into an area, give it the kind of credibility and experience that it needs to become accepted, and then we move on. I would say that in the world of immune modulators, we’ve done that.”
Just to make things clear, “DARPA has no laboratory space,” 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 the Unconventional Pathogen Countermeasures program.”
“These hands never get dirty,” Carney jokes. Program managers like him—almost all PhD’s or MD’s
or the equivalent, with years of experience in their fields—are compared to horse-racing pros, like jockeys. They pick and choose and encourage those who actually do the work. In fact, DARPA has been described as 140 decision makers united by a common travel department. (Usually, 23 of these are in the Defense Sciences Office.) They build communities of principal investigators who otherwise might not know much about each other. “The people who do our work are the smart people outside this building,” says another program manager, Alan Rudolph. “You can have all the visions you want, but if there isn’t a horse to ride, you’re not going anywhere in the race. Now, sometimes you’ve got to go out and convince the horse to run your race. Of course, the way we do that is to incentivize them with big money.”
“People around here get desensitized to what a million dollars means,” Goldblatt says. “People around here get desensitized to what ten million dollars mean.”
What would happen if these DARPA program managers weren’t around?
“Probably a lot of these projects would never be done,” Carney replies. “In fundamentals, we are tolerant to risk. Others are less tolerant to risk. So it might take a lot longer for somebody to get support. Or you don’t know if they would ever pass muster to be able to get money from other agencies.”
What else is on Carney’s mind?
He wonders if it might be possible to recognize “a genetic personality.”
“Is there a way to identify people who have a particular behavioral vulnerability that makes them more likely to be involved in lying and deceiving people from the standpoint of the terrorism issue?” he asks.
Has it been established that such a gene exists?
“No. Only in the figment of my imagination. But Michael can tell you that I’m a little different from the normal cut of people. I like to dream about things.”
Hunger, exhaustion and despondency also slow humans down. Dealing with that is the province of the Metabolically Dominant Soldier program, managed by Joe Bielitzki. Bielitzki is a proud son of St. Sylvester’s parish on Chicago’s Near Northwest Side, near Logan Square. He has the broad shoulders and chest of a triathlete, which is the event for people who think marathons are for sissies. It is an endurance race combining three long-haul events—swimming, bicycling and running. He still competes, even though he is in his fifties.
Bielitzki jokes that “Metabolically Dominant Soldier” sounds like he’s trying to create Spider-Man. No, not exactly, he explains. But his aim is high. He is tinkering with the internal machinery of human cells—controlling cellular metabolism and other activity within the cells—with the aim of tuning up every soldier’s metabolism to the level of Olympic endurance athletes. “We want every war fighter to look like Lance Armstrong as far as metabolic profile,” he says, referring to the American cycling champion. “A metabolically dominant soldier has strength and endurance that doesn’t quit. The Energizer Bunny in fatigues kind of does it. Keeps going and going.”
He claims he is not talking about creating superhuman strength. But he is interested in improving human cells from the extremely small parts up. Take mitochondria, for example. They produce the energy to power the cell. He is interested in modifying the number of mitochondria in muscle cells and their efficiency at creating energy. He is confident that he can take an individual now formidably trained to perform 80 pull-ups before exhaustion and render him capable of 300. Not to mention being able to walk forever with a 150-pound pack.
He likes the slogan “Be all that you can be and a lot more.”
One of the ways Bielitzki would like to do this is by eliminating the need for food. “One of the things we know about war fighters is that we can’t get enough calories in them to maintain high levels of strength and endurance over time,” he says. “And so metabolic dominance is really focused on—if you can’t get enough into ’em, why not just do away with food for three to five days completely?
“Special Forces guys working a 14-hour day are going to burn 6,000 to 7,000 calories a day. If we increase it to 24 hours a day”—that would be if Carney’s program works and these guys don’t sleep—“they’re going to need 12,000 calories a day. You can’t eat that much. Well, you can, but you’re not going to feel good about it. It boils down to one Meal, Ready to Eat, and 46 PowerBars. You can’t eat 46 PowerBars in a day. You can’t even carry ’em. And so the question is, if we can only get 15 to 20 percent of your calories into you in a rational way, why put any into you at all? Why not, say, live off what you’ve got? We’ve all got stored calories—we just don’t have access to them right now. So this is about improving the muscle and mitochondria so they can utilize the energy that’s available. Maybe instead of deploying you lean and mean, we deploy you mean and plump.
“And the other issue is how do you deploy the soldiers at peak and keep them at peak the whole time they’re out there so there’s no degradation in their performance level, either cognitively or physically and maybe most importantly emotionally?
“When I say ‘emotionally’—I don’t know if you’ve ever done endurance sports?”
Ah, no.
“The one thing we know is that when you get hypoglycemic”—when you run out of carbohydrate energy—“you start to get depressed. You become despondent. You lose focus, mental acuity, response time, but mostly you just don’t care. And that’s a bad thing to have happen to you on the battlefield.
“We know that happens with Special Forces guys.” Twenty-four hours after they go into action, “their physical levels are 40 percent below where they were when they started. And we want to get rid of that degradation in performance.”
Bielitzki insists he is not talking about building supermen.
The Department of Defense “says this is about winning. This is not about losing,” Bielitzki says. “It’s not about having the war fighters sent out on the field to die. When you look at reasons for failure and you look at reasons why people die, they are getting weak, getting hungry, making bad decisions, being unable to continue. Those are the reasons you get killed. We want to remove that if we’re going to have to put people in harm’s way. This is not about Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator.”
And this would make you metabolically dominant relative to whom?
“Everybody else. My nutrition and my ability to utilize stored energy supplies for three to five days is such that I don’t need to eat calories, but I always have calories available for energy.”
When you start asking questions at DARPA, one reply comes up a lot: “The civilian implications of this technology have not escaped us.”
Take the moment, for example, when it finally sinks in that Bielitzki is talking about fixing your cells so that you could live off your fat. A man who has worked out for years in an unsuccessful attempt to control his potbelly quickly raises his hand. “Me, me,” he croaks. “Give some to me.”
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.”
A science and technology policy wonk, deeply worried about engineered human evolution in all its forms, stops dead when told about the potential for cell enhancement to conquer fat. “It does what?” she asks. “Okay, so I burn in hell for this. Sign me up.”
“Will it have significant dual use?” Bielitzki asks. “Probably. Will the International Olympic Committee ban it? Absolutely. My measure of success for this is that the IOC bans everything that we do. We know that Lance Armstrong is different than everybody else. Can we safely induce it in anybody in a short period of time? That’s really what metabolic dominance is about. Will there be a commercial market for it? Probably. Somebody has to make it. Is this a classified project at this point? No. This is all open.”
Does this change human nature?
“I don’t think human nature changes very much. Cognitive carrying capacity to hold information hasn’t changed,” Bielitzki says.
Ah yes. T
his brings us to Alan Rudolph.
Alan Rudolph is the godfather of the telekinetic monkey.
Rudolph has a goofy, boyish grin, stylish rimless glasses, a PhD in cell biology from the University of California at Davis and an MBA from The George Washington University. He is the program manager for an extraordinarily broad portfolio of DSO’s projects. He jockeys hundreds of principal investigators. But he has also gotten his hands dirty. He 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. This 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 and trying to roll the ball down the road. It makes it an interesting place, no doubt.”
He likes to describe himself as a “combat zoologist.”
“Let me give you a little bit of my background so you understand my perspective,” he says. “I’m a zoologist, and I think there’s maybe three of us in the whole DOD. I come from systems taxonomy, physiology, the thinking about populations, ecologies, communities and organisms, how they adapt and evolve. Then I went off and got an MBA because I wanted to figure out how to make these things happen. A lot of things happen because somebody’s got to make some money. Bad or good.”
So now he’s working on everything from multilegged robots to computerized human eye implants to brain-machine interfaces—the famous telekinetic monkey.
“The culture here allows you to say what if, and I’m willing to cross the boundary. What’s born here is a fundamental philosophy that says what if we can just increase the number of interconnects between living systems and the nonliving world—hardware or software—what could happen?”
