Article featured in Nature:
“DARPA is making a big push into biological research — but some scientists question whether its high-risk approach can work.
(…) the first biology funding office to operate within the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s avant-garde research arm. The Biological Technologies Office (BTO), which opened in April 2014, aims to support extremely ambitious — some say fantastical — technologies ranging from powered exoskeletons for soldiers to brain implants that can control mental disorders.
DARPA’s plan for tackling such projects is being carried out in the same frenetic style that has defined the agency’s research in other fields. Ever since it was created in 1958, a year after the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by launching the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, the agency’s mission has been to prevent any more such surprises by getting there first. So DARPA’s programme managers at the BTO are free to pour tens of millions of dollars into ambitious projects without waiting around for niceties such as peer review. And by working closely with its contractors as they develop their technology, the agency aims to drive discoveries across the often-deadly gap between basic research and commercialization… read more.