The fight against pathogens is usually reactionary; a pathogen evolves or mutates, developing a drug resistance or finding a more efficient path toward infection, and researchers scramble to shift tactics for fighting off said pathogen. That’s not good enough for DARPA, which wants a means to look into the future so researchers can stop an outbreak of a potentially dangerous pandemic before it ever begins.
The aptly titled Prophecy program is seeking a range of technologies that will aid in the development of an effective crystal ball, including in vitro platforms for recreating virus-host interactions, better means of sequencing viral genomes to test for sequencing errors and mutations, and algorithms that can predict the rate, direction, and phenotype of viral mutations before they happen.
Capping all that off, they want countermeasures that allow scientists and agencies to erect “high energy evolutionary boundaries” that keep genetic mutations that might result in a pandemic of some kind from ever happening.Like pretty much all DARPA initiatives, this one sets an ambitious goal, but the real interesting stuff could be the technological fallout. As Danger Room points out, even if Prophecy fails to create those evolutionary boundaries that stop future mutations before they happen, the ability to predict, even in a vague sense, the way certain pathogens will likely evolve could lead to more efficient manufacturing and stockpiling of vaccines and allow health agencies to better organize their resources in front of an impending outbreak.
[FedBizOpps via Danger Room]
Five amazing, clean technologies that will set us free, in this month's energy-focused issue. Also: how to build a better bomb detector, the robotic toys that are raising your children, a human catapult, the world's smallest arcade, and much more.


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There is no need to stockpile vaccines because the human energy field contains the means to eliminate all viral, fungal and bacterial infections almost instantaneously. This inherent intelligent is known as the Symbolic Coder who translates complex health problems into symbols that allow easy visualization. For example, a person had a viral infection in his lungs and throat which the doctors could not cure. An energy healer saw this coding as a line of red dots across the throat and a large area of red dots in the right lung area. The healer proceeded to remove the dots into a hyperspace co-dimension so that the virus was no longer in the patient's body. In another case, a woman had a pinched nerve in her back from lifting a large suitcase off the airport baggage carousel. She had to lie down all day for three weeks because the pain was so intense. The Symbolic Coder simply showed this complex condition as a knotted rope. The energy healer then untied the knot and removed it from the woman's back. The Symbolic Coder can also change the frequency of the human antibodies such that they do not attack the body as a foreign substance, as seen in the autoimmune disease MS. The most amazing thing about the Symbolic Coder is that he displays a video animation of the health problem. One man had digestive problems after being shot up badly in three tours of Vietnam. The animation showed the skin on the chest opening up to reveal the esophagus, stomach and intestines. The scanning started from top to bottom after which the chest skin closed back together. This lasted about a minute after which the veteran was healed. I would recommend to DARPA to start understanding the capabilities of the human energy field rather than devising mathematical algorithms for predicting mutating diseases, all of which can be cured anyhow by energy techniques.
government agency + future seeing = 1984 orwellian world?
anyone else scared by this?
Minority Report much?
I always ask myself when I see something in a sci-fi movie that seems unreasonable, "Would Darpa attempt to do this."
The answer is almost always: YES.
All i got out of this was...
what if they try to predict a pathogen that never comes
then the stockpileing would be useless: money goes to waste
It does not make sense to do this unless we have the technology to proof that it will occur.
I like their effort. but unfortunently thats all that it is effort and wasted money
What the other commentators missed was the fact that DARPA makes WEAPONS! That is their job. whats really going on here is they want to make pandemic weapons that the US is immune to.