By Damien Gayle
Tomorrow’s soldiers could be able to run at Olympic speeds and will be able to go for days without food or sleep, if new research into gene manipulation is successful.
According to the U.S. Army’s plans for the future, their soldiers will be able to carry huge weights, live off their fat stores for extended periods and even regrow limbs blown apart by bombs.
The plans were revealed by novelist Simon Conway, who was granted behind-the-scenes access to the Pentagon’s high-tech Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency.
With a budget of almost $2billion a year DARPA, established in 1958 after the USSR’s first successful space mission shocked America, has a goal of maintaining U.S. technological dominance on the battlefield.
Among it’s many ambitious projects, the agency is working on an exoskeleton that will allow soldiers to run faster and lift prodigious weights. But its most controversial work involves genetic modification.
DARPA is working on triggering genes that will make soldiers’ bodies able to convert fat into energy more efficiently so they are able to go days without eating while in the warzone.
With plump soldiers able to go on deployment for days living just off their own body fat, that would free up space in their kit bags hitherto used for ration packs.
Mr Conway’s new thriller, Rockcreek Park, is based on the premise that a body with extraordinary qualities is discovered in Washington DC.
After his visit to DARPA, the former infantry officer told the Sunday Express: ‘It’s all about improving the efficiency of energy creation in the body.
‘Soldiers would be able to run at Olympic speeds, carry large weights and go without sleep and without food.’