Inside the Pentagon's human enhancement project-Be More Than You Can Be

[Guest guest]

Be More Than You Can Be Heat-resistant. Cold-proof. Tireless. Tomorrow’s soldiers are just like today’s ?only better. Inside the Pentagon’s human enhancement project. By Noah Shachtman Page 1 of 3 next ?lt;/SPAN> The lab is climate-controlled to 104 degrees Fahrenheit and 66 percent humidity. Sitting inside the cramped room, even for a few minutes, is an unpleasantly moist experience. I’ve spent the last 40 minutes on a treadmill angled at a 9 percent grade. My face is chili-red, my shirt soaked with sweat. My breath is coming in short, unsatisfactory gasps. The sushi and sake I had last night are in full revolt. The tiny speakers on the shelf blasting “Living on a Prayer?are definitely not helping. Then Dennis Grahn, a lumpy Stanford University biologist and former minor-league hockey player, walks into the room. He nods in my direction and smiles at a technician. “Looks like he’s ready,?Grahn says. Grahn takes my hand and slips it into a clear, coffeepot-looking contraption he calls the Glove. Inside is a hemisphere of metal, cool to the touch. He tightens a seal around my wrist; a vacuum begins pulling blood to the surface of my hand, and the cold metal chills my blood before it travels through my veins back to my core. After five minutes, I feel rejuvenated. Never mind the hangover. Never mind Bon Jovi. I keep going for another half hour. The test isn’t about my endurance; it’s about the future of the American armed forces. Grahn and his colleagues developed the Glove for the military ?specifically, for the Pentagon’s way-out science division, Darpa: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. For nearly 50 years, Darpa has engineered technological breakthroughs from the Internet to stealth jets. But in the early 1990s, as military strategists started worrying about how to defend against germ weapons, the agency began to get interested in biology. “The future was a scary place, the more we looked at it,?says Michael Goldblatt, former head of Darpa’s Defense Sciences Office. “We wanted to learn the capabilities of nature before others taught them to us.?lt;/div> By 2001, military strategists had determined that the best way to deal with emerging transnational threats was with small groups of fast-moving soldiers, not hulking pieces of military hardware. But small groups rarely travel with medics ?lt;/FONT> they have to be hardy enough to survive on their own. So what goes on in Grahn’s dank little lab at Stanford is part of a much larger push to radically improve the performance, mental capacity, and resilience of American troops ?lt;/FONT> to let them run harder and longer, operate without sleep, overcome deadly injury, and tap the potential of their unconscious minds. The Advanced Research Projects Agency was founded in 1958 (the D was added in 1972) as a place to noodle around on ideas too big, or too far out, for the Cold War military-industrial complex. The results can sometimes be spectacular failures (nuclear hand grenade, anyone?). But Darpa has also pushed the development of some things that have become part of the fabric of military and civilian life: wearable computers, long-range drone aircraft, night vision, even the M16 rifle and the computer mouse. But the agency had mostly avoided the life sciences. Darpa’s directors in 1980s and 1990s weren’t interested ? and were happy to avoid the tangled ethical issues that often go along with research on human beings. Then, in June 2001, Tony Tether, an electrical engineer and Darpa veteran, left his job at the Sequoia Group, a venture capital firm, and returned to head the agency. Under his guidance, Darpa’s embryonic biology efforts began to multiply and expand. Research on biodefense led to research on the immune system, which led to more general research on the human body. “There was a sense before that Darpa wouldn’t get into human R & D. That was somewhere Frank Fernandez didn’t want to go,?one former program manager says, referring to Darpa’s director from 1998 to 2001. But Tether “had a more open attitude. He was more permissive about dealing with humans.?lt;/FONT> The agency had already enlisted an unusual team of bioscience experts. One program manager had been a chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory working on biomimetics; soon he was funding research on artificial limbs. Another early member of the team, Joe Bielitzki, studied the effects of space travel on animals while he was NASA’s chief veterinary officer. To head the push, Darpa had turned to Michael Goldblatt, VP of science and technology at McDonald’s. He’d helped develop a self-sterilizing package and pitched Darpa on the material’s potential as a bandage, figuring that what was good for a Big Mac might be good for bullet wounds. The agency offered him a job... which he turned down. But two years later Darpa supersized the offer ?lt;/FONT> Goldblatt was hired to head the Defense Sciences Office, a division with a major focus on human enhancement. Grahn and his research partner, biologist Craig Heller, started working on the Glove at Stanford in the late 1990s as part of their research on improving physical performance. Even they were astounded at how well it seemed to work. Vinh Cao, their squat, barrel-chested lab technician, used to do almost 100 pull-ups every time he worked out. Then one day he cooled himself off between sets with an early prototype. The next round of pull-ups ?lt;/FONT> his 11th ?was as strong as his first. Within six weeks, Cao was doing 180 pull-ups a session. Six weeks after that, he went from 180 to more than 600. Soon, Stanford’s football trainers asked to borrow a few Gloves to cool down players in the weight room and to fight muscle cramps. In 2001, Heller went to Darpa. The agency saw the potential of the Glove for training recruits; the Stanford researchers received their first funding in 2003 and got $3 million. In trying to figure out why the Glove worked so well, its inventors ended up challenging conventional scientific wisdom on fatigue. Muscles don’t wear out because they use up stored sugars, the researchers said. Instead, muscles tire because they get too hot, and sweating is just a backup cooling system for the lattices of blood vessels in the hands and feet. The Glove, in other words, overclocks the heat exchange system. “It’s like giving a Honda the radiator of a Mack truck,?Heller says. After four months of using it himself, Heller did 1,000 push-ups on his 60th birthday in April 2003. Soon after, troops from Special Operations Command were trying out the Glove, too. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/bemore.html Page 1 of 3 next >