Wired 15.03: Be More Than You Can Be
Be More Than You Can Be
Heat-resistant. Cold-proof. Tireless. Tomorrow’s soldiers are just like today’s — only better. Inside the Pentagon’s human enhancement project.
The lab is climate-controlled to 104 degrees Fahrenheit and 66
percent humidity. Sitting inside the cramped room, even for a few
minutes, is an unpleasantly moist experience. I’ve spent the last 40
minutes on a treadmill angled at a 9 percent grade. My face is
chili-red, my shirt soaked with sweat. My breath is coming in short,
unsatisfactory gasps. The sushi and sake I had last night are in full
revolt. The tiny speakers on the shelf blasting “Living on a Prayer”
are definitely not helping.Then Dennis Grahn, a lumpy Stanford University biologist and former
minor-league hockey player, walks into the room. He nods in my
direction and smiles at a technician. “Looks like he’s ready,” Grahn
says.Grahn takes my hand and slips it into a clear, coffeepot-looking
contraption he calls the Glove. Inside is a hemisphere of metal, cool
to the touch. He tightens a seal around my wrist; a vacuum begins
pulling blood to the surface of my hand, and the cold metal chills my
blood before it travels through my veins back to my core. After five
minutes, I feel rejuvenated. Never mind the hangover. Never mind Bon
Jovi. I keep going for another half hour.The test isn’t about my endurance; it’s about the future of the
By 2001, military strategists had determined that the best way to deal
American armed forces. Grahn and his colleagues developed the Glove for
the military — specifically, for the Pentagon’s way-out science
division, Darpa: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. For
nearly 50 years, Darpa has engineered technological breakthroughs from
the Internet to stealth jets. But in the early 1990s, as military
strategists started worrying about how to defend against germ weapons,
the agency began to get interested in biology. “The future was a scary
place, the more we looked at it,” says Michael Goldblatt, former head
of Darpa’s Defense Sciences Office. “We wanted to learn the
capabilities of nature before others taught them to us.”
with emerging transnational threats was with small groups of
fast-moving soldiers, not hulking pieces of military hardware. But
small groups rarely travel with medics — they have to be hardy enough
to survive on their own. So what goes on in Grahn’s dank little lab at
Stanford is part of a much larger push to radically improve the
performance, mental capacity, and resilience of American troops — to
let them run harder and longer, operate without sleep, overcome deadly
injury, and tap the potential of their unconscious minds.
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