FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

The Pentagon Wants to Use DNA to Cure Diarrhea

DARPA wants to get soldiers off the pot and back on the ground.

There are a lot of risks out there on the battlefield. Bullets, bombs, mortars, mines. Heck, you could even step in a hole and break your leg off. But the eggheads at DARPA are worried about another scourge: diarrhea.

That's right. Military sources told Bloomberg News that over a million service days have been lost during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq "due to severe diarrhea in deployed forces," and those are a million days that could've been spent winning the war. Now, they're being spent on the pot playing Angry Birds. (By the way, that "million days" number includes the sum of days that individual soldiers could've spent fighting, but instead they spent them pooping.) "There’s a sense of urgency and you’re constantly thinking about where the next latrine is," Mark Riddle, a Navy medical researcher studying diarrhea, explained to Bloomberg. “In that kind of situation you start wondering how well a soldier can perform, target bad guys and do his or her mission."

Advertisement

Enter DARPA with its $3.2 billion budget and hoards of PhDs. DARPA doesn't just want to cure diarrhea. They want to develop quick, temporary cures for a whole host of diseases, from malaria to the flu and the common cold. Diarrhea is a symptom of some of these conditions, though it can also happen due to food poisoning or lactose intolerance.

Since medical researchers have been trying to cure these diseases for decades, the quest for a solution is hardly a breakthrough, but DARPA's hypothetical solution might be. The agency wants to develop drugs based on nucleic acids, like those that form DNA, that will instruct the body to produce antibodies that attack the disease. So rather than giving the body a dead virus to figure out how to defeat, like a vaccine might, it's giving the body the code to produce a solution on its own. "In effect, the body makes the drug," said DARPA program manager Col. Daniel Wattendorf.

If they're successful, DARPA could change pharmaceuticals as we know it. In fact,  major pharmaceutical companies have been trying unsuccessfully to develop the technique for some time now, but with the backing of America's defense budget and a mission to accomplish the impossible, DARPA's got a fighting chance of getting it done. After all, these are the guys that invented the proto-Internet and nuclear-powered cyborg insects. Oh, and also the robotic cheetah that can run nearly 30 miles-per-hour and humanoid robots designed to rescue people from danger.

Can DARPA conquer diarrhea, too? Well, we've already got the Ruskies out of the way, and it'll likely be another year before Iran finishes building its nuclear weapon. Why not use all that defense spending on curing diseases instead of blowing up civilians with drones?

Image via Flickr