DARPA wants to kill the next Ebola crisis in the womb

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is the research organization of the United States military which, since its founding, been tasked with developing advanced military technology. However, according to Engadget, now DARPA has turned its attention towards the Ebola crisis, or more specifically, how to prevent it from even getting off of the ground.

“We keep seeing these unexpected bio-threats pop up along the globe, and we don’t want to be in the position where we are reactive,” said Alicia Jackson, deputy director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, as quoted by FedScoop. “We want to be in a position where we’re building a platform technology that can be applied not just to Ebola, but the next thing.”

“DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, which launched earlier this year, looks at biology as a technology, with a focus on harnessing living systems or integrating those systems with nonliving systems,” said Jackson, as quoted by RT. “We are trying to rethink that paradigm. We’re not just interested in solving the Ebola crisis. We want to be prepared for the next thing. We’re looking for a way to completely transform the way we’re attacking these problems, either with a vaccine or therapeutics or diagnostics.”

“We don’t just throw money over the fence and hope a good idea comes to fruition,” Jackson said. “We really work with the person who we’re funding to structure their technical project in a way that allows us to gauge and measure progress every step of the way. Biology is the most ancient and most powerful technology that we know of,” Jackson said. “It can do things that no other man-made machine or synthetic chemistry can even begin to approach in terms of the materials it can create and the functions that it can do.”

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