The US government is looking to take health technologies and innovations coming out of DARPA and other defense agencies and expand and adapt them for civilian use under a new ARPA-H program.
This month, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) put out a broad agency announcement for its “Shared Health Applications Research for Everyone” (SHARE) program.
The SHARE program “seeks to adapt Department of Defense (DoD) and other related government entities’ health innovations more broadly to all Americans.”
“In the DoD context, these innovations are developed to support a specific population: the warfighter. Under SHARE, these technologies would be adapted to other populations, such as pediatric and geriatric”
ARPA-H
With SHARE, ARPA-H is looking to “extend health innovations—or innovations from other domains that could be adapted to health—to accelerate better health outcomes more broadly.
“In the DoD context, these innovations are developed to support a specific population: the warfighter. Under SHARE, these technologies would be adapted to other populations, such as pediatric and geriatric.”
In particular, ARPA-H is looking for “proposals that will transform health innovations into healthcare solutions that can be adapted to health systems (e.g., medical devices or health records systems) or scaled to larger application areas.”
ARPA-H was established within the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on March 15, 2022 and was modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
DARPA has funded research into many modern technologies that have since become commercially available to the public, such as the foundation for the Internet (ARPANET), GPS, and voice assistants like Alexa, Cortana, or Siri.
On the healthcare front, there are many DARPA research programs that are aimed specifically at treating soldiers, but could prove extremely beneficial to civilians.
A few examples include:
- Bridging the Gap Plus (BG+): a five-year program that combines AI, neurotech, and biosensors in an attempt to restore natural functions such as breathing, bowel and bladder control, movement, touch, and proprioception that can be lost when the spinal cord is damaged.
- Cornerstone: a five-year program to prevent behavioral and cognitive injuries from occurring within seconds of a blast or impact to the head.
- ADAPTER: a program to develop an implantable or ingestible bioelectronic carrier that would eliminate the five major bacteria associated with traveler’s diarrhea, along with mitigating the effects of jet-lag.
- POCUS: a program aimed at improving portable ultra-sound devices with AI to respond to injuries in real-time.
- ReVector: a program aimed at diminishing the olfactory attraction mosquitoes have to human skin — or even actively repelling mosquitoes — by engineering the skin microbiome to temporarily alter chemical production.
On the mental health front, DARPA has been funding research into preventing suicide, depression, and PTSD in peculiar ways.
For example, just last week DARPA issued a Disruption Opportunity for a potential research program called “Rapid Eye Movement Restoration and Enhancement for Sleep-deprived Trauma adaptation” (REM REST), which “aims to identify neural mechanisms and demonstrate the ability to modulate REM sleep that improves stress adaptation and traumatic memory consolidation.”
Last year, under the premise of identifying people at risk of depression and suicide, the Pentagon’s research funding arm launched the Neural Evidence Aggregation Tool (NEAT) program, which focused on “aggregating preconscious brain signals to determine what someone believes to be true.”
While mental health among soldiers is a serious issue for the Department of Defense, applications coming out of the NEAT program have the very real potential to give governments and corporations the ability to hack human beings at the preconscious level.
Technologies coming out of DARPA’s NEAT program can indeed help save lives and prevent suicides while improving the mental wellbeing of thousands of soldiers.
But these same technologies, when hooked up to the Internet of Bodies, could also mean total enslavement over all of humanity if ever deployed for nefarious purposes by public and/or private entities on the broader population.
The Pentagon is also investigating how to fundamentally alter what it means to be human, funding research into creating super humans that are smarter, faster, and stronger through human performance enhancement.
A Pentagon-sponsored RAND report published in November, 2021 outlines the technological potentials of this controversial transhumanist research, which includes potentially “adding reptilian genes that provide the ability to see in infrared,” and “making humans stronger, more intelligent, or more adapted to extreme environments.”
If successful, these “people” would have the potential to never tire and think smarter, move faster, jump higher, see farther, hear better, hit harder, live longer, adapt stronger, and calculate quicker than any other human being on the planet.
What advantages or disadvantages would people with godlike abilities have compared to the rest of humanity if these technologies ever became commercially available to the public?
In March, ARPA-H launched its first Open Broad Agency Announcement (BAA), identifying four initial focus areas for investment that touch upon elements of the Internet of Bodies, genetic engineering, vaccine development, tissue regeneration, and AI-enabled health surveillance, data collection, and analyses.
The solutions that ARPA-H seeks have the potential to vastly improve the overall health and wellbeing of citizens, but at the same time they could also contribute to a technocratic, biomedical security state in which citizens’ physical and mental health statuses are constantly monitored and surveilled to enforce compliance with whatever mandates public and private entities decide to issue.
As investigative journalist and author Whitney Webb warned in Unlimited Hangout back in May, 2021, ARPA-H could “merge ‘national security’ with ‘health security’ in such as way as to use both physical and mental health ‘warning signs’ to prevent outbreaks of disease or violence before they occur.
“Such a system is a recipe for a technocratic ‘pre-crime’ organization with the potential to criminalize both mental and physical illness as well as ‘wrongthink.‘“
Image by Freepik
