Here’s the full discourse:
“I’m Dan Wattendorf from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. I’m in the biological technologies office and I thank you for inviting me here to speak to you here today. DARPA is particularly interested in this area because we feel like there are two aspects of this technology that are critically important to both deliberate on the capabilities and the security surrounding them. One is what is exceptional abo gene drives which is the ability for a genetic element particularly when it is synthetic or designed by an individual versus natural to propagate and change a population and the ability to do that could have security ramifications for the United States and the globe. Secondly, which is as Phil mentioned is the facility to perform these types of experiments and create these capabilities faster than whatever has been occurred before because the emergent technology of genome editing techniques.
Because of those two reasons, DARPA is looking at this technology as something that is capable for great benefit and is also potentially something that could be a security threat. Particularly at ecosystems and population levels for organisms that reproduce quickly such as agricultural or animal or plant. So, I think these circumstances are our key for us to be able to understand the deliberation of the community that is looking at the best way to inform the process of how to investigate these capabilities most effectively.
However, DARPA has a very specific role in the community to not admire the problem and be able to look at all the potential ramifications and even for both capability in good and in bad but also to be used as a tool to create technology that could either mitigate the threat or ensure that its success works in a safe way. So it is certainly within possibility that DARPA would take on efforts to invest in gene drive-based technologies in ways that would either provide it to be a safe tool or safe technology and ways that would be able to mitigate threats when used by our adversaries or by others who are malinformed or by doing it potentially with malfeasance in mind.
So, it is very helpful for us to not only understand the deliberations of this community, what you decide to do as you move forward, but also to be able to understand how you could point to what are technologies that you need to do to either make it safer or make it able for us to mitigate the threat.
So, we are particularly looking at not only the outcome of this group but potentially even specific recommendations to be able to understand where you see that those technologies being able to be helpful. Because we may be required to actually invest in technologies to improve this capability during the process of elaborating the challenges and benefits of it. Because we do not, we may not have the time in this case to actually wait for and make calls for certain scientific actions and communities to deliberate, we actually may need to be working on technology solutions right now; and the alacrity of our institution to be able to do that is that it can; and that’s where, why we are here today. To be able to follow that, thank you.”
Dan was the project manager for DARPA’s ADEPT mRNA pandemic solution; and here, he is talking about DARPA needing to weigh in on the new gene drive technology that these folks are congregating on. Clearly, DARPA sees this as a threat in the same way it sees a pandemic as a threat, and they want to get a handle on it and find solutions. In the manner he is speaking, to me it sounds like they already have ideas of what they want to do.
This is meddling with mother nature, God’s own design. “GMO” is being taken to a whole new level (species extinction can be a result) and the justifications of this collaboration, or the sales point, sounded like it is for the sake of solving malaria deaths in Africa. But the Colonel is pointing out it can also be for nefarious purposes and DARPA wants to be ready.
I don’t know if I’m more frightened by this group (NIH, FNIH, DARPA, and Gates Foundation) or by DARPA alone given the outcome and solutions used for the COVID pandemic. These scientists seem to feel entitled to play with mother nature and at the same time are admitting it is extremely dangerous.
The whole thing reminds me of a Jurassic Park movie on steroids…. toying with nature. “Gene drives can unintentionally spread beyond intended regions or species.”
The book The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman addresses this topic of genetic engineering and I had to set the book down and stop reading it.
I hope I’ve called attention to this because I think the public needs to be able to weigh in on this. We already have GMO that somehow went without public opinion and oversight. Now this.