Hasn't anyone in the Pentagon read Jurassic Park?

You know something's up when a project's goal is to "[eliminate] the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement." And that something is awesome.

Darpa's Biodesign research is looking into producing organisms that can live forever, be loyal (read: un-hackable) and be shut-off by a "genetically-coded kill switch." You know, just in case something goes horribly, horribly wrong.

The project is getting $6 million outright, but will probably benefit from the $20 mil they're pushing for a new synthetic biology program and $7.5 mil put towards improving methods of analyzing cellular genomes.

This kinda reminds me of the time in high school when we extracted the DNA out of a strawberry. Not because we did anything scientifically irresponsible groundbreaking with it, but just seeing the proteins swirling around in our little plastic tubes and knowing that that fluffy substance was the secret to the biochemical processes of life was mind-blowing.

Yeah, I don't get out much.

Full article and image credit: Wired Danger Room