Today’s most irresistible story, from Katie Drummond, on Wired mag’s Danger Room blog:

Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.

This is either very funny, or frightening, or–I don’t know, can they really do this???

Drummond apparently had trouble getting civilian molecular biologists to react to this. One, who wasn’t named, said he “would love to comment but Darpa has installed a kill switch in me.”

It’s reassuring that the defense department (Darpa is its research arm, or one of its research tentacles) is exploring cutting-edge biology to help keep us safe. From the enemy, anyway. If this thing works, who’s going to keep us safe from Darpa? Calling Bill Adama!

- Paul Raeburn

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.