Defense technologyDARPA launches Biological Technologies Office
DARPA has established a new technology office — the Biological Technologies Office (BTO) — which will merge biology, engineering, and computer science to harness the power of natural systems for national security. With the establishment of the new office last week, biology takes its place among the core sciences that represent the future of defense technology.
“Biology is nature’s ultimate innovator, and any agency that hangs its hat on innovation would be foolish not to look to this master of networked complexity for inspiration and solutions,” DARPA director Arati Prabhakar said in his Testimony to Subcommittee on Intelligence, Emerging Threats and Capabilities, U.S. House of Representatives, on 26 March 26, 2014.
Technology, like biology, constantly evolves. DARPA said that it is the agency’s mission to stay ahead of the shifting technology curve by making critical, early investments in areas that cut across fields of research and enable revolutionary new capabilities for U.S. national security. Now DARPA is poised to give what it describes as unprecedented prominence to a field of research that can no longer be considered peripheral to technology’s evolving nature. Starting last week, biology takes its place among the core sciences that represent the future of defense technology.
DARPA has created a new division, the Biological Technologies Office (BTO), to explore the increasingly dynamic intersection of biology and the physical sciences. Its goals are to harness the power of biological systems by applying the rigorous tools of engineering and related disciplines, and to design next-generation technologies that are inspired by insights gained from the life sciences. DARAP says that BTO’s programs will operate across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales — from individual cells to humans and other organisms and the communities in which they operate, and from the time it takes for a nerve to fire to the time it may take a new virus to spread around the world one sneeze at a time. “All told, BTO will explore the intricate and highly adapted mechanisms of natural processes and demonstrate how they can be applied to the mission of national defense,” DARPA says.
BTO expands on the work undertaken by DARPA’s Defense Sciences (DSO) and Microsystems Technology (MTO) Offices. Recent progress in such diverse disciplines as neuroscience, sensor design, microsystems, computer science, and other longstanding areas of DARPA investment has begun to converge, revealing newly emergent potential ready to be realized.
