True Skin

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Creating Mutant-Powered Troops

By David Axe
Courtesy Of "Wired"

Greater strength and endurance. Enhanced thinking. Better teamwork. New classes of genetic weaponry, able to subvert DNA. Not long from now, the technology could exist to routinely enhance — and undermine — people’s minds and bodies using a wide range of chemical, neurological, genetic and behavioral techniques.

It’s warfare waged at the evolutionary level. And it’s coming sooner than many people think. According to the futurists at the U.S. National Intelligence Council, by 2030, “neuro-enhancements could provide superior memory recall or speed of thought. Brain-machine interfaces could provide ‘superhuman‘ abilities, enhancing strength and speed, as well as providing functions not previously available.”

Qualities that today must be honed by years of training and education could be installed in a relative instant by, say, an injection or a targeted burst of electricity to the brain. Rapid advancements in neurology, pharmacology and genetics could soon make such installations fairly easy.

These modifications could give rise to new breeds of biologically enhanced troops possessing what one expert in the field calls “mutant powers.” But those troops may not American. So far, the U.S. military has been extremely reluctant to embrace human biological modification, or “biomods.” And that could result in a veritable mutant gap. In this new form of biological warfare, the U.S. could find itself outgunned.

A 29-year-old Georgetown-trained researcher with degrees in microbiology, health physics and national security, Herr is one a handful of specialists in the defense community preaching greater U.S. investment in biomods. First as a consultant with the Scitor Corporation, a Virginia-based firm whose clients include top military and intelligence agencies, and later as the head of his own research organization, Herr’s job has been to think about biological modifications whose effects he says are “more than evolutionary.”

The Once-and-Future Mutant Age

Ten years ago, there were all sorts of biomods enthusiasts roaming the halls of the Pentagon’s premiere science division. In 2002 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched an ambitious effort aimed at tweaking troops’ physiology to reduce their susceptibility to stress, sleep deprivation, fatigue, pain and blood loss while enhancing their memory and learning. The idea was to help soldiers “perform at their peak, stay at their peak,” one former Darpa official told Wired.

The program was called Metabolic Dominance. It promised to produce America’s first mutant warriors.

Progress was slow — understandably so considering the scope and scale of the effort. In 2007 Tony Tether, then Darpa director, downplayed Metabolic Dominance, signaling the beginning of the end of the program. “We’re making it possible for people to be all that they can be, not making them be better than they can be,” Tether told Wired.

By 2008 the science agency had all but abandoned Metabolic Dominance. Herr began his work the next year, studying and advocating biomods for an alphabet soup of military and intelligence clients. In effect, Herr helped pick up the pieces from Darpa’s initial, failed effort.

In 2009 Herr was assigned to a Pentagon-funded project aimed at understanding “unit cohesion.” That is, what makes one group of soldiers keep fighting through hunger, thirst, exhaustion, confusion, and the deaths of comrades. Unit cohesion has won and lost conflicts since the beginning of warfare, but it was still poorly understood.

For his unit cohesion study, Herr interviewed Army infantrymen, Navy submariners and Air Force drone operators. Partway into the two-year study Herr had an epiphany. “The ‘aha’ moment,” Herr tells Danger Room, “was seeing a link between an objective physiological phenomenon — knowing the effects on the body and brain of stress hormones — and how that matched with all the literature on unit cohesion.”

In other words, Herr had a vision of the stress hormones that our glands pump into our bloodstreams in life-or-death situations, and, in turn, impact the behavior of trained combat units. Tracing this physiological blueprint for combat effectiveness, Herr realized it could be altered biologically. “All of sudden the Matrix made sense,” Herr says, referencing the secret world of the eponymous 1999 sci-fi film.

The military could select troops and their officers for their unique, inborn ability to cope with stress. Or it could directly tweak a soldier’s body functions — re-balancing the normal hormonal cocktail so the soldier doesn’t panic, doesn’t retreat and keeps on fighting, even when the odds are against him and any normal person would just give up.

Specific enhancement methods Herr studied include: focused diet and exercise regimens; injections of the stress-inhibiting brain molecule neuropeptide Y; electroshock-style Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation to boost thinking; and gene therapy for enhancing a whole host of body functions by literally altering a person’s DNA with viruses or chemicals.

Following the unit-cohesion study, Herr began teaching individual self-enhancement techniques in Washington, D.C. and Indiana. His students were officers and civilians slated to deploy to Afghanistan under a Pentagon program that embeds American mentors in the Afghan government. Among other tricks, Herr instructed them to minimize brain-stimulating blue light in order to protect their sleep cycles; eat small, frequent, protein-rich meals to maintain steady cognition; and exercise in order to biochemically neutralize the steady stream of stress hormones that advisers experience in their year-long, sometimes dangerous deployments.

Herr says the curriculum fed into his other projects, many of which are classified. “I can’t really talk about those,” he says. Clearly, the techniques Herr taught to the advisers could also be applied to pilots, sub and carrier crews and frontline infantry, for whom the stress is even greater and the work even more critical to U.S. national defense.

But for these combatants, the Pentagon wants to go beyond merely encouraging self-enhancement. Patrick Lin, a professor at California Polytechnic State, notes the military’s “ongoing interest in using pharmaceuticals, such as modafinil (a cognitive enhancer), dietary supplements, as well as gene therapy to boost the performance of warfighters.”

And in February the British Royal Society identified four small-scale DARPA biomodification efforts focusing on stress-reduction and neurological enhancement, plus an obscure Air Force program aimed at the “exploitation of external stimulant technology” to enable airmen “to receive and process greater amounts of operationally relevant information.” That’s generally understood to mean drugs.

Herr says defense planners are discussing a comprehensive strategy to unite these programs and coordinate growing military investment in modification technologies. “What I’ve been working on is trying to support and guide that discussion.” To that end, he has briefed the Defense Science Board, a panel of the Pentagon’s top technology advisers.

A comprehensive biomods strategy would get the Pentagon back to the same conceptual point it was at a decade ago at the launch of Metabolic Dominance — and prove that U.S. military leaders are serious about preparing for the coming era of mutant warfare.

Whether or not the Pentagon is ready, the biomods bug is spreading, spurred by government programs and, increasingly, privately funded research all over the world. But Herr cautions against expecting biomods to transform society and warfare tomorrow. “We’re still in the foundational phase.”

For its part, the National Intelligence Council expects some resistance to biomods. “Moral and ethical challenges to human augmentation are inevitable,” the Council advised. Americans, especially, tend to have deep reservations about changing people’s biology, Herr points out. That doesn’t mean they won’t do it. He points out increasing acceptance of cognitive-enhancing drugs among American college students. “Seventy to 80 percent of upperclassman have at least once taken these drugs illegally to get better grades,” he says. “If the younger generation in our country is more comfortable with this, then that would make the use of these kinds of things in society, and by extension the military, very different.”

But the U.S. is still likely to move more slowly on biomods than say, China or Russia. “Other countries are probably much more likely to take advantage of these [technologies],” Herr says. “The question will be how they do it.”

“Other countries are also interested in these areas but are not so open as the U.S. about what they are doing, so it is difficult to know exactly what is going on in many cases,” notes Rod Flower, a professor at the William Harvey Research Institute in the U.K. and the chair of the Royal Society’s biomods study. It’s equally hard to tell to which terrorists, militants and criminal groups these countries might have ties — and whether new biological weaponry might proliferate through these channels.

The best-case scenario for biomods, Herr says, is widespread, legal and peaceful use of performance-boosting methods to elevate creativity, potentially leading to technological breakthroughs in other fields that in turn could “really enhance the quality of people’s lives.”

“It would be nice to think that the efforts of military scientists could be put to peaceful uses,” says Flower.

Herr says when it comes to weapons-grade mutations, it’s wisest to focus on worst-case scenarios, albeit only the most plausible one. “What can be useful is a body of research which says here are things, which if they happen, would cause major discontinuities.”

The most realistic future biomods apocalypse is one in which a hostile foreign government or terror group finds ways to subtly change a lot of people. “The worst-case scenario is people could start doing things that wouldn’t be recognized,” Herr says. “At least you can do something about if if you know it’s happening.”

Genetic Sneak Attack

Among his duties at Scitor, Herr was tasked with “red teaming” the performance-enhancement field on behalf of the Defense Department in order to assess the approach America’s rivals are taking to the technology. Drawing on his childhood conversations with his world-traveling parents, Herr concluded that military biomodifications could develop very differently in other countries.

Herr says he achieved a breakthrough in his red-teaming in 2010, while in Boston attending what he describes as a “totally academic, non-military” conference on gene therapy, which typically involves “infecting” a person with a specially tailored virus that can modify DNA and in principle, cure a disease or correct a defect.

But fixing genes is hard. Damaging them is a lot easier, one of the speakers at the Boston conference admitted. “He said if our goal was figuring out how to create muscular dystrophy, we’ve been very successful, but if our goal is to treat it, we’re far from the goal,” Herr recalls. “He meant it as a laugh line. But I’m sitting in the back thinking … it’s kind of scary. They know how to break us but don’t know how to fix us.”

In one dire scenario, an army might attack its enemies by changing their physiology to make them dumber, slower, more afraid. In The Atlantic recently, two researchers even discussed the possibility of governments or terror groups genetically assassinating enemy leaders by tailoring cancers specifically to the target’s DNA. The authors pointed out that the U.S. State Department already surreptitiously collects DNA samples from foreign dignitaries.

There are several ways these theoretical bio-attacks could be accomplished. At an August war game hosted by the Army, Herr and other experts said biological agents could be slipped into an enemy’s food or water supplies or dispersed by air. Herr says it could also be possible to secretly add an agent to a commercial product. “Someone thinks he’s taking protein powder but he’s really taking God-knows-what.”

If America gets caught unaware by some future bio-assault, it won’t be because Herr didn’t try to prepare us. After three years at Scitor, this fall Herr struck out on his own with an ambitious plan to advance the biomods field. He started two companies: one, a research firm called Helicase; the other, a sort of personal consultancy called Cognitrition that Herr says will offer clients advice on “enhancing cognitive performance through nutrition and day-to-day activity.”

U.S. To Replace Human Surveillance With Computers

The U.S. government has funded the development of so-called automatic video surveillance technology by a pair of Carnegie Mellon University researchers who disclosed details about their work this week -- including that it has an ultimate goal of predicting what people will do in the future.

"The main applications are in video surveillance, both civil and military," Alessandro Oltramari, a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon who has a Ph.D. from Italy's University of Trento, told CNET yesterday.

Oltramari and fellow researcher Christian Lebiere say automatic video surveillance can monitor camera feeds for suspicious activities like someone at an airport or bus station abandoning a bag for more than a few minutes. "In this specific case, the goal for our system would have been to detect the anomalous behavior," Oltramari says.

Think of it as a much, much smarter version of a red light camera: the unblinking eye of computer software that monitors dozens or even thousands of security camera feeds could catch illicit activities that human operators -- who are expensive and can be distracted or sleepy -- would miss. It could also, depending on how it's implemented, raise similar privacy and civil liberty concerns.

Alessandro Oltramari, left, and Christian Lebiere say their software will "automatize video-surveillance, both in military and civil applications."

(Credit: Carnegie Mellon University)

A paper (PDF) the researchers presented this week at the Semantic Technology for Intelligence, Defense, and Security conference outside of Washington, D.C. -- today's sessions arereserved only for attendees with top secret clearances -- says their system aims "to approximate human visual intelligence in making effective and consistent detections."

Their Army-funded research, Oltramari and Lebiere claim, can go further than merely recognizing whether any illicit activities are currently taking place. It will, they say, be capable of "eventually predicting" what's going to happen next.

This approach relies heavily on advances by machine vision researchers, who have made remarkable strides in last few decades in recognizing stationary and moving objects and their properties. It's the same vein of work that led to Google's self-driving cars, face recognition software used on Facebook and Picasa, and consumer electronics like Microsoft's Kinect.

When it works well, machine vision can detect objects and people -- call them nouns -- that are on the other side of the camera's lens.

But to figure out what these nouns are doing, or are allowed to do, you need the computer science equivalent of verbs. And that's where Oltramari and Lebiere have built on the work of other Carnegie Mellon researchers to create what they call a "cognitive engine" that can understand the rules by which nouns and verbs are allowed to interact.

Their cognitive engine incorporates research, called activity forecasting, conducted by a team led by postdoctoral fellow Kris Kitani, which tries to understand what humans will do by calculating which physical trajectories are most likely. They say their software "models the effect of the physical environment on the choice of human actions."

Both projects are components of Carnegie Mellon's Mind's Eye architecture, a DARPA-created project that aims to develop smart cameras for machine-based visual intelligence.

Predicts Oltramari: "This work should support human operators and automatize video-surveillance, both in military and civil applications."

Via: "C-Net"

Beginnings Of Bionic

Michael McAlpine’s shiny circuit has a coiled antenna and is glued to a stiff rectangle. But the antenna flexes, and the rectangle is actually silk, its stiffness melting away under water. And if you paste the device on your tooth, it could keep you healthy.

The electronic gizmo is designed to detect dangerous bacteria and send out warning signals, alerting its bearer to microbes slipping past the lips. Recently, McAlpine, of Princeton University, and his colleagues spotted a singleE. coli bacterium skittering across the surface of the gadget’s sensor. The sensor also picked out ulcer-causing H. pylori amid the molecular medley of human saliva, the team reported earlier this year in Nature Communications.

At about the size of a standard postage stamp, the dental device is still too big to fit comfortably in a human mouth. “We had to use a cow tooth,” McAlpine says, describing test experiments. But his team plans to shrink the gadget so it can nestle against human enamel. McAlpine is convinced that one day, perhaps five to 10 years from now, everyone will wear some sort of electronic device. “It’s not just teeth,” he says. “People are going to be bionic.”

McAlpine belongs to a growing pack of tech-savvy scientists figuring out how to merge the rigid, brittle materials of conventional electronics with the soft, curving surfaces of human tissues. Their goal: To create products that have the high performance of silicon wafers — the crystalline material used in computer chips — while still moving with the body. Beyond detecting bacteria to nip potential illnesses before they begin, such devices could comfortably monitor a person’s vital signs and deliver therapeutic treatments.

... today’s researchers focus on tailoring electronics to fit the human form. One group, led by materials scientist John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has created flat electronic “temporary tattoos” that stick to skin. This summer, the researchers invented an electronic finger sleeve that detects movement and touch. Now, a similar technology can hug the heart like cling wrap. Such a device could sense erratic beats and zap a spastic organ back into rhythm. Other inventions, implanted into the brain, might send out microshocks to jolt away an epileptic seizure.

In the last two years, another team, led by Zhenan Bao of Stanford University, has been working toward making stretchy, artificial skins from rubber and carbon nanotubes. The skins will feel like the real thing to the touch — and they will have a sense of touch too, electronically detecting changes in strain and pressure from a stretch or a pinch.

In the short term, flexible, stretchable electronics could help make medical devices smarter, by integrating sensors into sutures, surgical gloves or balloon catheters that feel their way through the passageways of a heart. Incorporating electronics onto (and into) human bodies for everyday use may follow close behind.

“We went from a computer that fit in a room, to a computer that goes on your desk, to a computer that can go in your pocket,” McAlpine says. Joining computers to the body, he says, is “the next logical step.”

Rogers is one of the scientists pushing the field forward. And last year, he put some skin in the game.  

Stuck On Skin

Silicon wafers are lousy for making skin electronics. “In terms of mechanics,” Rogers says, “they’re basically like a plate of glass.” When the body twists and bends, they break.

But the appeal of silicon is its history. “There’s been a half a century of global research and development to understand how to purify it, dope it, make devices out of it and manufacture with it,” he says.

ENLARGE

This flexible brain sensor can monitor activity more gently and accurately than current technologies.

J. Rogers, D.-H. Kim et al/Nature Materials 2010

A typical computer chip has metal wires that carry a current along a rigid silicon base. Components etched into the base control the flow. Rogers’ team is working with the brittle silicon to make it flexible and stretchable enough to ride atop skin. By creating ultrathin silicon ribbons instead of etching into a silicon block, the researchers have produced parts that bend without breaking. Think of how you can roll up a piece of paper but not a wooden board, Rogers says. The paper’s thinness makes it supple.

In his team’s epidermal electronic devices, squiggles of silicon ribbons snake across rubbery support surfaces. The squiggles join with gold to form the devices’ sensors — for detecting temperature or pressure or strain — and link up in a mesh that puckers and flexes along with the sheet it is mounted to.

One day, a slim skin sticker designed by the team could be used to a track a person’s health (SN: 9/10/11, p. 10). It would even be gentle enough for premature babies. The electronic gadget might also be tapped for nonmedical uses: Secret agents with an electronic sticker hidden under a shirt collar could pick up and send out conversations, an extra-covert way to “wear a wire.”

Already, Reebok is working with Rogers to develop a skin-mounted sports monitor designed to move with the body while tracking an athlete’s health. Reebok’s flexible device straps on instead of stamping on, “but it’s a great first step in that direction,” says Rogers.

While gadget lovers wait for the device to debut sometime later this year, Rogers and collaborators have moved beyond flat electronics into a third dimension. In August they reported inventing an electronic “finger tube” — a molded polymer sheath with built-in sensor disks of silicon and gold. For a snug fit, Rogers’ team used a 3-D scanner to map a finger’s form. He envisions the stretchy tubes will one day top the fingers of smart surgical gloves, to enhance the sense of touch for delicate operations.

Rogers is also teaming up with other researchers to apply the new technology to bigger body parts — such as hearts.

ENLARGE

TOUCH SENSITIVE

Electronic finger sleeves (top) might pave the way for human-machine interactions or find their way into smart surgical gloves. When squeezed, a sensor’s ability to store an electric charge, its “capacitance,” changes (bottom).

Source: M. Ying et al/Nanotechnology 2012; Photo: J. Rogers

Keep The Beat Alive

When St. Louis surgeons remove a failing heart from a transplant patient, biomedical engineer Igor Efimov and his colleagues are among the first to know. They take advantage of the heart’s last moments of life to test prototypes of a cardiac technology that might one day have the power to heal.

Efimov and his team have joined with Rogers’ group to develop the device, which slips around the heart and uses a low-energy method to gently calm spastic tremors. Jittery flutters called atrial fibrillations afflict millions of people worldwide and can bump up stroke risk.

A safe, effective atrial defibrillator exists, but it is bulky, with rigid electrodes and wires that eventually wear out, short-circuit or leak. What’s more, “nobody wants to use it because it’s too painful,” Efimov says. The defibrillator uses so much energy to jump-start a heart that patients describe it as a mule kick to the chest. His team’s method is more like a love tap; it’s pain-free.

Inside the “heart sock” are printed sensors that monitor activity across the surface and stimulators that deliver tiny shocks when needed. And because the sock is light and floppy, it could outlast today’s clunky cardiac equipment.

Recently, Efimov and colleagues have begun testing prototypes on donated human hearts. A partnership between Barnes Jewish Hospital and Efimov’s lab at Washington University, both in St. Louis, delivers sick hearts from patients to scientists. When transplant patients get new hearts, researchers get to experiment on the old ones.

ENLARGE

PYRAMID BOOST

By adding some texture to a rubber film (magnification above, on right), researchers can increase its sensitivity to pressure. One day this rubber may be combined with other technologies to create artificial skin.

Both: Benjamin Tee, S. Mannsfeld et al/Nature Materials 2010

“It’s a good deal,” Efimov says. After the heart is pulled from the body and unhooked from its blood supply, the researchers have a short window of time before the heart shuts down. They shuttle it to the lab and conduct their experiments, laying pieces of prototype heart sock material on the organ to measure electrical activity and other properties. In the team’s sensing tests so far, he says, it is “working really wonderfully.”

Efimov has also stimulated rabbit hearts with a more complete version of the sock, and is planning to try it on the hearts of living dogs — the best animal model for human atrial fibrillation, according to Efimov. With so many people worldwide relying on defibrillators and other implanted heart devices, Efimov sees an obvious market.

Though Efimov focuses on cardiac therapy, he has ideas for other uses for the technology. Scientists could use related devices on muscles or bones, he says, or to hook up human brains to the Internet. “There are so many applications,” he says. “It’s just amazing.”

Handle With Silk

A Web-browsing brain may sound like science fiction, but researchers have already figured out how to implant flat chips into the human brain to pick up neural signals and turn them into actions (SN: 7/2/11, p. 26).

But forcing flat electronics to lay against the soft, sloping surface of the brain is a delicate and tricky task. The device must physically touch the cortex and be stiff enough that surgeons can pass it through tiny openings in the skull. One of the best current technologies taps into neural activity by jabbing sharp pins into the brain where they contact clumps of brain cells. The pins mount to a rigid silicon chip.

Though easy to handle, today’s approaches irritate the tissue and can trigger long-term inflammation. Low-profile devices that instead sink into the brain’s crevices and work with its micromovements — bulges, contractions and pulses — could be less traumatic and longer lasting. If scientists can figure out how to work with them.

“You can’t really hold or manipulate the device very well because it’s so thin and flexible and sloppy that it’s not even self-supporting,” Rogers says. “So how do you move it around?”

One answer is silk. As with McAlpine’s tooth sensor, thin films of silk may help scientists get a grip on flexible electronics. Because the films are stiff when dry, researchers can add a layer of mesh circuits and easily maneuver the films through holes in the skull and onto the brain. Doused with fluid, the film dissolves and the circuit snuggles against the brain’s folds. Since the silk doesn’t bother the body, film remnants can flush safely into the skull cavity (SN: 11/3/12, p. 15).

“It eventually degrades, and the body has a very low immune response to it,” says biomedical engineer Fiorenzo Omenetto. To make the films, Omenetto and his team at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., process silk into its basic protein ingredients. First, they chop up silkworm cocoons, and then they boil the bits in a salt solution to break down the fibers. “It’s like making pasta,” Omenetto says. At the end of the entire process, what’s left is a mixture of water and fibroin — a versatile silk protein that scientists can form into almost anything, including thin sheets.

In 2010, Rogers, Omenetto and colleagues tested a silk-coupled electronic device on a feline brain. They placed the silk-backed mesh circuit onto the visual cortex of an anesthetized cat and monitored brain activity. Compared to thicker devices, the mesh molded more closely to the brain and recorded stronger signals. In people, such flexible devices may one day control prosthetic arms, map brain activity or quell seizures in epileptic patients.

All-In Skin

Instead of trying to make traditional electronic materials flexible, Stanford’s Bao and colleagues are turning the goal around: They’re trying to make flexible materials electronic. By layering thin textured films with carbon nanotubes, Bao and her colleagues are figuring out how to make touch-sensitive artificial skin — no rigid parts required.

Today’s ultrasensitive strain sensors are built with a thin layer of silicon film. Pressing on the film changes the amount of current zipping through it, allowing the pressure to be measured. The gadgets are very sensitive, Bao says, but also very fragile. For the applications she is interested in, fragile doesn’t work: “A lot of wear and tear will easily damage those kinds of devices.”

In 2010, Bao’s team made a sensing system that works a little differently by sandwiching a layer of microstructured rubber between two charge-holding metal grids. When pressure is applied to the grids, the amount of charge changes. The pattern of holes carved into the rubber bumped up its sensitivity: Even a butterfly-light touch compressed the cutouts, Bao and colleagues reported in Nature Materials.

Of course, metal tends to crack when bent. So last year, the researchers figured out how to give the sandwich’s bread layers a little stretch.

They replaced the metal grids with carbon nanotubes, thin carbon wires that can handle extreme bending and still conduct a current. In this version, the sandwich’s middle was a flat rubber film that wasn’t so sensitive, but combining the technologies and spotting the resulting sandwiches onto another material could yield sensitive, stretchable artificial skin.

Such skin may one day patch areas of real flesh damaged by burns, for example. “Twenty years from now,” Bao says, “I can definitely see some flexible sensor sheet that looks just like human skin and can be grafted onto wounds and function like real skin.”

In many ways, Bao’s artificial skin behaves like the real thing. But it has one big hurdle to clear: It still uses wires to send its messages to a computer. If the skin ever made its way into a prosthetic, it would need to relay signals wirelessly to the wearer’s brain. “Ultimately we want the sensors to be talking directly to the neurons,” Bao says.

She imagines a future in which a person’s electronic skin and other implanted devices link up. A world where a fly lands on the artificial skin of a person’s arm, which speaks to an electronic device in the brain, which tells the person to shoo the bug away with a flick of a supersensitive finger.

Today, researchers are buzzing along building bits of electronics that can be integrated into the body.  Someday soon, they may cobble the pieces together and get them to converse in a truly bionic being.

Via: "Science News"