Tag Archives: umbrella corporation

DARPA’s new project: genetic engineering, assembly-line style

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DARPA stands for “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.” Who wants to bet that “fuels and medicines” are not the primary objective of this research?

[Emphasis below is mine.]

Darpa, Venter Launch Assembly Line for Genetic Engineering

Darpa, the Pentagon’s far-out research arm, has kicked off a program designed to take the conventions of manufacturing and apply them to living cells. Think of it like an assembly line, but one that would churn out modified biological matter — man-made organisms — instead of cars or computer parts.

The program, called “Living Foundries,” was first announced by the agency last year. Now, Darpa’s handed out seven research awards worth $15.5 million to six different companies and institutions. Among them are several Darpa favorites, including the University of Texas at Austin and the California Institute of Technology. Two contracts were also issued to the J. Craig Venter Institute. Dr. Venter is something of a biology superstar: He was among the first scientists to sequence a human genome, and his institute was, in 2010, the first to create a cell with entirely synthetic genome.

[...] Scientists have tweaked cells in order to develop renewable petroleum and spider silk that’s tough as steel. And a host of companies are investigating the pharmaceutical and agricultural promise lurking — with some tinkering, of course — inside living cells.

[...] Synthetic biology, as Darpa notes, has the potential to yield “new materials, novel capabilities, fuel and medicines” — everything from fuels to solar cells to vaccines could be produced by engineering different living cells. But the agency isn’t content to wait seven years for each new innovation. In fact, they want the capability for “on-demand production” of whatever bio-product suits the military’s immediate needs.

Note: “on demand production of whatever suits the military’s immediate needs.” There you have it. Fuels and medicines – right. What could go wrong? How about the T-Virus? : ) Or as another fictional example, here’s a teaser released in Nov/2010 to Wired magazine — supposedly from Neill Blomkamp’s upcoming movie (March/2013) Elysium:

Presidents Day: 9 semi-interesting things

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1) Rick Santorum, quite simply, is a monster in a sweater vest - So, to recap, Santorum opposes prenatal screening by prospective parents because they might abort their horribly deformed child who won’t live anyway outside the womb, but wants to enforce state sanctioned invasive procedures for those who choose to have an abortion, because you sluts already stuck some shit up there, so now you need to see pictures. Basically, what Santorum thinks should be the norm is a pregnancy as lottery standard. You miss your period, cross your fingers and hang on for nine months, because Allah God will mystify you at the end with either a healthy child you didn’t want, or maybe a child you were hoping to have but which had it’s heart on the outside of its body and will die 2 hours after birth.

2) Arizona Republican debate on Wednesday at 8pm ET - The final four have not shared a stage in almost a month: Not since Romney won Florida, Nevada and Maine. Not since Santorum triumphed in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado. Not since Paul won — well, Paul won nowhere, though he told me on CNN’s “State of the Union,” “It all depends on how you measure winning … the bottom line is who is going to get the delegates … and we think we’re doing pretty good.” Also not winning anywhere since the last debate is Gingrich, who retains his down-but-never-out storyline. The former House speaker promised recently, “I have been front-runner twice. I suspect I’ll be the front-runner again in a few weeks.”

3) Juan McCain, who gave us one of the most nasty, negative campaigns in recent memory with Sarah Palin and her blatantly racist followers, fears the NEGATIVE TONE of the GOP race could aid Obama reelection - Former Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) said Sunday he’s worried the negative tone in the GOP campaigns could help President Obama win a second term in the White House. “I think there’s reason to be concerned about it,” said McCain on ABC’s This Week. “I’ve been in very tough campaigns. I don’t think I’ve seen one that was as personal and as characterized by so many attacks as these are.”

4) Bachmann: GOP is extremely ‘pro-women’ - “There is no anti-women move whatsoever. The Republican Party is extremely pro-women,” Bachmann said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “What we saw was President Obama’s signature piece of legislation, which is ‘Obamacare,’ demonstrated 3-D.”

…

5) “If my book is racist and anti-Semitic, how did Sean Hannity, Erin Burnett, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Megyn Kelly, Lou Dobbs and Ralph Nader miss that? How did Charles Payne, African-American host on Fox radio, who has interviewed me three times, fail to detect its racism?” – Pat Buchanan  || “Yeah, how did [this] cartoonish list of white reactionary conservatives (and a black Fox News guy — ostensibly Pat’s “black friend”) not see the racism in Pat’s book? HOW?!” — Bob Cesca

6) Republican presidential battle could get messy - The meteoric rise of Christian conservative Rick Santorum, a strong opponent of gay marriage and abortion, has turned the race on its head. Victories on February 7 in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado have catapulted Santorum from a distant third to first — a Gallup poll now gives the former Pennsylvania senator an eight percentage point lead over Romney nationally. Should he pull off a win on February 28 in Romney’s home state ofMichigan, all bets will be off and the Republican establishment will be left facing the specter of a bitter fight all the way to its August 27-30 convention.

7) Santorum rallies thousands at Georgia megachurch (Or why are churches tax-exempt again?) - Rick Santorum isn’t a native son of Georgia. He’s not a Southern Baptist. But on Sunday night, an audience of thousands at the First Redeemer Church welcomed him as one of their own. The GOP presidential contender and former senator from Pennsylvania came to this sprawling megachurch an hour north of Atlanta to make his pitch to voters on the home turf of former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a rival, two weeks ahead of the Peach State’s Super Tuesday primary.

8) Ron Paul warns U.S. ‘slipping into a fascist system’ - The White House hopeful said the country had been on the wrong course ever since President Woodrow Wilson, who helped establish the U.S. Federal Reserve in 1913. Paul often laments the increased size of the government over the last 100 years and the move away from the gold standard. He has also voiced concerns about American’s civil liberties. “We’ve slipped away from a true Republic,” Paul said. “Now we’re slipping into a fascist system where it’s a combination of government and big business and authoritarian rule and the suppression of the individual rights of each and every American citizen.”

9) And this is how the Tyrant Virus (T-Virus) began - The quest to grow meat in a lab rather than on an animal is due to reach its climax this fall, with the first-ever culture-dish hamburger served to a celebrity taster after a $330,000 development effort. Mark Post, a physiologist at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, said the project is being funded by an anonymous investor who is interested in “life-transforming technologies” and believes lab-grown meat could revolutionize the food industry. Post has been talking about serving up the first lab-grown burger for a long time, but it took the anonymous 250,000-euro ($330,000) contribution to turn the dream into reality. || Note: the doomsday H5N1 flu virus was also created in the Netherlands, just 2 hours away in Rotterdam. Just saying.