| Title | What DARPA's Biological Technologies Office is Working on in 2017 | |
| Date | Sunday January 15 2017, @11:21PM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| from the ♩♪♫♩-Taking-Care-of-Business-♩♪♫♩ dept. | ||
Scientific American interviewed the director of DARPA's Biological Technologies Office:
The Pentagon's research and development division, DARPA—the creative force behind the internet and GPS—retooled itself three years ago to create a new office dedicated to unraveling biology's engineering secrets. The new Biological Technologies Office (BTO) has a mission to "harness the power of biological systems" and design new defense technology. Over the past year, with a budget of about $296 million, it has been exploring challenges including memory improvement, human–machine symbiosis and speeding up disease detection and response.
DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is hoping for some big returns. The director of its BTO, neuroprosthetic researcher Justin Sanchez, recently spoke with Scientific American about what to expect from his office in 2017, including work on neural implants to aid healthy people in their everyday lives and other advances that he says will "change the game" in medicine.
Some of the ideas discussed include "living foundries" (using microbes to create drugs), nucleic acid approaches to immunization, and brain-controlled prosthetics. More information can be found in this 73-slide PowerPoint PDF. No word on whether or not replacing PPT with direct brain stimulation is in the works.
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printed from SoylentNews, What DARPA's Biological Technologies Office is Working on in 2017 on 2024-04-25 13:05:09