Thank you Frank.

Good morning.

It’s my pleasure to be here in Denver and welcome you to DARPATech 99.

DARPA’s mission is to develop technology to revolutionize national security.

We are working on a variety of these programs that we plan to share with you this week.  

We’re excited by the technological and military possibilities of these directions and hope to 
inspire you to work with us on these efforts.  You can help us three ways:  We need your 
good ideas and proposals to meet our technical objectives.

We need good people to come to DARPA for a rotation as a program manager.  And for our 
military colleagues, we need your help in iterating the development of our technologies 
with military concepts of operations and then transitioning into EMD and production.

Today I’d like to give you a preview of one of the important new areas that we are working 
in:  Harnessing biological sciences and technology for national security.  An extremely 
urgent need in this area is the defense against biological attack.

(S*) Not only are our troops vulnerable to attack by biological agents, but our military can 
be impeded by attacks against ports, airfields, and supply depots.  We know that a number 
of countries have developed or are developing offensive biological capability.  The threat is 
real.

But in addition to the military threat, there is a terrorist threat again population centers of 
ours and our allies.  Small scale attacks may be adequate to immobilize national will with 
panic unless reasonable defenses are available.  Terrorists do not need the technological 
sophistication of a military offensive biological warfare program.  A military offensive BW 
program strives for predictable effect so that military operations can be planned.  Terrorists 
could actually benefit from the variation of the onset and outcome of the illnesses creating 
added panic in the public.

The final concern is that bioengineering technology is becoming more widespread and 
accessible to non-experts.  Bioengineering means possible new, previously unseen 
pathogens.  

(S*)  To be able to defeat biological weapons, we need to understand what we are up 
against.  Biological agents are actually widely varying in their own characteristics as well 
as their effects.

Viruses and toxins are submicron in size up to bacteria of several microns size.  These 
various agents have very different modes of harming the body, with illnesses that may be 
incapacitating or lethal depending on the agent used.  For some of these agents, we have 
treatments.  For many others, there is no cure currently.

The onset of symptoms can be very rapid for toxins or take hours to days for other agents.  
The lethal or incapacitating dose can vary from one particle to 10,000 depending on the 
agent.  An infective, lethal dose of anthrax (5000 – 10,000 spores) would fit on the period at 
the end of a sentence.  This wide variation in properties makes it difficult to develop 
effective defenses.

(S*)  Bioengineering adds to the difficulties.  As the 20th century draws to a close, the field 
of bioengineering is rapidly maturing and the technology is spreading around the globe.  
The implications of these developments on biological warfare defense are profound.  While 
this technology can play a large role in the development of novel therapeutics and 
immunizations, it can also lead to the creation of deadlier pathogens.  These include 
bacteria resistant to all known antibiotics, pathogens disguised so that the natural defenses 
of our bodies do not recognize them, and previously harmless bacteria or viruses which 
have been modified to become virulent pathogens.  In addition, research has shown that 
bioengineering can lead to the development of pathogens modified for increased infectivity, 
enhanced survivability in the environment, and altered routes of infectivity.  Finally, there 
is the possibility that pathogens may be modified to increase their production of toxins in 
the body.  These sinister developments pose great challenges to those of us creating 
countermeasures and have had a major impact on the directions of the DARPA program in 
biological warfare defense.

(S*)  DARPA has set the ambitious goal to develop technologies to thwart the use of BW 
agents by both military and terrorist opponents.

(S*) To do this, we are supporting technologies to prevent the attacks as well as detect and 
deal with the consequences of a biological warfare attack.  The Special Projects Office, as 
part of their countering underground facilities studies, is developing an understanding of 
what technical steps are necessary for a biological weapons production facility, what 
signatures it must thus have, and what options we have for identifying and characterizing 
what is happening in a buried BW production facility.  SPO is also working on sensors, 
sensor networks, and protective responses.  

(S*) In addition to these efforts, the Defense Sciences Office is working on a variety of 
other exciting approaches that you will be hearing more about today.  The Microsystems 
Technology Office is developing some of the technologies needed as to make advanced 
biosensors and therapeutic delivery systems.  DARPA is working closely with the military 
Services, other Defense agencies, the intelligence community, and civilian health agencies 
to ensure coordination and that there is no duplication of effort.

(S*)  In the area of biological warfare agent sensors, we are sponsoring efforts to develop 
detection approaches that will lead to small, lightweight, low-cost detectors which integrate 
the capability to detect many agents simultaneously.  The DARPA biosensors program is 
working closely with our colleagues in DTRA, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, to 
meet these goals.  DARPA’s program in Environmental Biosensors includes a number of 
platforms for bioagent identification:  a miniaturized time-of-flight mass spectrometer, a 
handheld detector, a flow cytometer, a biochip that identifies the bioagent using ribosomal 
RNA, and an aerogel platform that will provide revolutionary high-surface area materials 
for biosensing.  In addition, the program is replacing the antibodies that are currently used 
to identify the bioagent threat in clinical and laboratory settings with smaller molecules that 
are more robust and, therefore, more useful in a tactical situation.  An important facet of the 
DARPA biodetectors program is to be able not only to detect the presence of an agent but 
whether it is dead or alive.  Some of the BW agents are quite fragile in the environment and 
die quickly.  Some detector approaches will still signal on these dead, ineffective agents.  
Our goal is that warning detectors should only alarm on real threats.  Finally, the detectors 
need to be robust and unattended.  We do not want to have to send trained biotechnicians 
into the field with every system.

(S*) SPO is going to develop these detection technologies, now mostly in the laboratory, 
into robust, fieldable sensor systems that are fully characterized, reliable, and rugged 
enough for operational use.  The next step after that is to develop methods of reacting.  
After all, detection is not protection, it is only the first step.  They are exploring concepts 
for a “Vaccinated” building.  Most of us spend a great part of our day in buildings.   This 
applies to the civilian population in cities, to embassies, and to non-wartime activities on 
military bases.  The idea being that after detection of a BW agent, buildings equipped with 
defensive capabilities could destroy the agent and/or prevent the spread of the agent within 
the building.

(S*) One of the efforts in the Defense Sciences Office BWD program is focused on 
information management as part of consequence management.  During a BW event, 
information and casualties will likely overload the system.  The Consequence Management 
effort is developing effective technologies to reach back into expert information in a useful 
format so that the correct “what to do” is available where it is needed. A second goal of the 
program is to provide operational awareness and management tools so that the BW event 
does not spread and the best course of action is taken.

(S*) DARPA is targeting these software tools, called ENCOMPASS, towards our soldiers 
in the field.  They will also be useful for first responders in our cities.  These soldiers, 
firemen, and policemen have other primary jobs that they must spend time training for and 
performing.  The ENCOMPASS software tools are being developed so that each group can 
tailor the tools to their current mode of operations, rather than have an entirely different 
system of information sharing and management imposed on them during a BW crisis.  

(S*) ENCOMPASS includes software tools for developing electronic playbooks 
(operational plans for responding), for sharing situational awareness among the many 
responders (various levels of commanders, medical facilities, rescue workers), and the 
ability to predict and track casualties.  I have told you about only a portion of the DARPA 
Biological Warfare Defense program.  Other presenters later today will tell you more.

(S*) Now let me move on to another area that interests DARPA.  Currently the areas of 
biological sciences and technology, information sciences and technology, and microsystems 
of electronic, optoelectronic, and mechanical components are separate fields.

(S*) DARPA is very interested in the interface of biology with the more traditional DoD 
technology areas of information technology and microsystems.  We think that there will be 
tremendous payoff for national security at this interface.  Steve Squires will be telling you 
more about this on Thursday during his Bio Futures talk.  Let me wet your appetite by 
telling you about a few existing DARPA programs that sit at this interface.

(S*)  The goal of the Controlled Biological Systems Program is to exploit activities and 
behaviors at the biological organism level in order to provide unique capabilities for 
numerous defense applications.  The program is aimed at controlling or mimicing 
biological systems for sensing, reporting, and countermeasure delivery.  There are three 
thrusts within this program.

(S*)  The first thrust is control of living creatures through taking advantage of natural 
behaviors or through training or changes in their development that make them responsive to 
substances of interest to DoD.  For example, think of the power of having insects that home 
in on explosives rather than their natural behaviour of tracking sex pheromones or food 
sources.  Alan Rudolph will tell you about some exciting results in this area later today as 
well as other accomplishments in the controlled biological systems program.

(S*)  The second thrust is to control living creatures directly through biointerfaces.  

(S*)  And the final thrust is to learn from nature at the whole organism level.  What does 
nature excel at that could benefit DoD?  One example is the lobster, a creature with a fairly 
simple nervous system (you can think of this as a simple wiring diagram with a fairly 
simple set of instructions) that is able to maintain position and orientation in the tidal surge 
zone.  DARPA contractors are taking lessons from how the lobster does this and applying it 
to robotic platforms. 

As you can see, the Controlled Biological Systems program is an example of a set of efforts 
integrating biological knowledge with the ability to interface microsystems to the biological 
organisms and understanding and exploiting the information technology of nature.

(S*) A second example of the power of the interface of biology with conventional DoD 
technologies is the Electronic Dog’s Nose program.  Dogs have an exquisite ability to 
detect extremely low vapor pressure explosives and thus are extremely successful in 
detecting landmines.  The difficulty is that dogs may be able to work for as little as 15 
minutes a day depending on the conditions and the dog, and they have a logistics burden 
associated with them.  DARPA is developing chemically, specific detection methods, many 
of which are based on how dogs do pattern recognition of explosives so that the military 
will have a real-time, portable, fieldable explosives detection capability.  Tomorrow Tom 
Altschuler will be telling you more about this exciting program.  

(S* - cutaway)   I’ve given you a few examples of the biologically based programs at 
DARPA.  We think that biology has a lot more to contribute to defense capabilities.  I hope 
I have given you a feel for the exciting challenges in the biological area.  We are looking 
for your good ideas to support these areas and to develop new program areas.

I’d like to thank you for coming to DARPATech and for participating in our technical 
community.  After all, DARPA only accomplishes things through funding good people to 
develop innovative ideas.  I hope you find the rest of the DARPATech Symposium 
interesting and stimulating.