5/24/2012

The Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) – often described as the mad scientist research arm of the Pentagon due to their fantastical projects like weaponized hallucinations, dirt cheap miniature spy computers, increasinglylifelike humanoid robots and more – is now in the process of developing a kind of factory for man-made organisms.

Their new program, called “Living Foundries,” was originally announced last year and aims to create a type of assembly line for genetically engineered products – assumedly for military applications since that is what DARPA is all about.

DARPA recently announced eight research awards totaling some $15.5 million in funds as part of this initiative including:

- $3.6 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

- $691,559 to the University of Texas at Austin

- $2.1 million to California Institute of Technology

- $1 million to the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution

- $3 million to J. Craig Venter Institute, Inc. (JCVI)

- $964,587 to J. Craig Venter Institute, Inc. (two separate awards)

- $907,269 to the President and Fellows of Harvard College

- $3,195,958 to the Leland Stanford Junior University
The two awards to JCVI shouldn’t be all too surprising given that Dr. Venter is well known as one of the first scientists to sequence a human genome. Furthermore, his lab was the first to develop an entirely synthetic organism in 2010.

The goal of the Living Foundries program is to radically transform the currently slow and expensive process of genetic engineering into a standardized and streamlined factory-like process.

Genetic engineering has progressed by leaps and bounds over recent years. Consider the goats whichproduce “milk” made of webs which is then layered with laboratory-grown human skin in order to make a substance four times stronger than Kevlar, genetically engineered bacteria which produce renewable fuels, pharmaceuticals created by genetically engineered organisms, and even modified bacteria which could turn sewage into electricity.

Unfortunately, DARPA isn’t seeking out this technology in order to create endless free energy for the world, as they are by definition researching for “defensive” (which more often than not means offensive) purposes.DARPA bemoans the fact that the bleeding edge of synthetic biological technologies “often take 7+ years and tens to hundreds of millions of dollars” to come to fruition (like Venter’s synthetic cell which cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 million according toPopular Mechanics).

The agency doesn’t have that kind of patience, so they are now seeking out an “on-demand production” solution which could produce any bio-product that the military decides it urgently needs.

This would be done through revising the entire process of biologically engineering substances all the way from initial design to the actual construction of the material or organism to quality control also known as efficacy evaluation.

This will be done though the creation of a library of “modular genetic parts,” which are standardized bits of biological matter which can then be assembled into various other materials, somewhat like the raw materials for most other mass-produced items.

Once they have created this library, DARPA wants to then create sets of “parts, regulators devices and circuits” which, together, can reliably create various genetic systems.

I think of this somewhat like the pipes, fittings and pumps required to assemble a working sewage system which can be assembled in nearly infinite combinations in order to meet nearly infinite sets of requirements.

They then seek to create “test platforms” which would test these new products quickly and effectively in order to make sure the production is actually working.

Katie Drummond of Danger Room put it like this: