DARPA Continues Human Experiments to Create Military Super Soldiers
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has a $2 billion yearly budget for research into creating a super solider as well as developing a synthetic police force. Working with the human genome, DARPA hopes to manipulate certain gene expressions. In experimentation, DARPA and the military industrial pharmaceutical complex are using natural abilities that are enhanced through genetic engineering.
Some of the medical feats DARPA would like to enhance are the ability of military soldiers to regrow limbs destroyed in battle.
By eliminating empathy, the Department of Defense (DoD) hopes to “enhance” a soldier’s ability to “kill without care or remorse, shows no fear, can fight battle after battle without fatigue and generally behave more like a machine than a man.”
Scientists are researching the construction of soldiers that feel no pain, terror and do not suffer from fatigue as tests on the wiring of the human brain are furthered by Jonathan Moreno, professor of bioethics at Pennsylvania State University. Moreno is working with the DoD in understanding neuroscience. The Pentagon allocated $400 million to this research.
Further study could be passed onto the general public in order to maximize profits as well as enhance the drug’s effectiveness. According to Joel Garreau, professor at Arizona University, DARPA is learning how to genetically modify human fat into pure energy by rewiring the metabolic switch which would create soldiers that require less food. By using gene therapy and combining enhancements to alter the color of the human eye is a blending of mutations that have no basis in the natural world.
In 2011, the British Academy of Medical Sciences published a paper explaining the necessity for “new rules to avoid ethical missteps.” Specifying the injection of human brain cells into animals that may give animals human memories or thought consciousness as the goal should be dealt with differently than a non-modified animal.
Human embryos can strengthen or deteriorate the animal test subject which prompted Senator Sam Brownback to push the Human Chimera Prohibition Act of 2005. Brownback expressed need for prevention of closed-door experiments that “blur the lines between human and animal, male and female, parent and child, and one individual and another individual.” The ethical aspect could be defined by two mandates of consideration:
1. They could target the hypothetical scientists creating monsters in petri dishes.
2. They could take a close look at the science that’s really happening in labs around the world.