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Wyss Institute's lung-on-a-chip

Not content with creating Terminator-like soldiers such as Atlas, and the Avatar heed-meld program that allows human soldiers to control their robotic equivalents from afar, the US Ground forces is now working on a man-on-a-chip. These HoCs will ostensibly be used to safely test new chemical weapons, and to explore possible treatments for exposure to chemic weapons, but long-term information technology's easy to imagine that these fries volition be used as the basis for sentient, human-like robot soldiers — much like the humanoid Cylon "skinjobs" in Battlestar Galactica.

Updated: The US Army'due south Edgewood Chemic Biological Center, where the research is being carried out, has contacted us to say that they do non create chemic weapons. They say that the HoCs will simply be used for defensive purposes. They too claim that United states in general does not produce chemical weapons, in accordance with the Chemic Weapons Convention — only it notwithstanding has a rather large stockpile.

In contempo years, a lot of time and money has been plowed into organs-on-a-chip — small plastic chips that incorporate cells from that specific homo organ, cultured from induced pluriopotent stalk cells (iPSC), with minor microfluidic channels interim like blood vessels, ferrying nutrients and waste products to and from the organs. While these OoCs aren't exactly the same every bit your lungs or heart, they provide a much more accurate (and ethical) testbed than animals for trialing new chemic weapons and pharmaceuticals. For more info, run across our story discussing how the organ-on-a-chip could supplant animal testing.

US Army human-on-a-chip diagram

At present, it seems, the U.S. Ground forces Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defense force, working with Harvard and other institutions with OoC chops, and funded by the Defence force Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), wants to put a bunch of OoCs on a single flake to create a human-on-a-bit. There aren't a whole lot of details at the moment, merely information technology sounds like the US Army wants to develop the living equivalent of a motherboard, with individual sockets for OoCs that are connected via microfluidic blood vessels. Going by the diagram, which is really all we have at the moment, the Army will begin with a unmarried device (is that the right word?) that features a human heart, lungs, and liver.

OoCs and HoCs are useful because they allow for the like shooting fish in a barrel, prophylactic, and repeatable testing of new chemicals and drugs without harming animals or actual humans. Testing is as uncomplicated as introducing the new compound into the microfluidic "blood stream," and and then watching how the organs react — whether they get inflamed, hemorrhagic, etc. Because the chips are transparent, and non inside a thoroughly opaque and alive human, it's much easier to find the effects of the new compound.

Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot. Click to zoom in.

Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot. Click to zoom in.

The ostensible goal, of course, is to meliorate the turnaround time of new chemical warfare agents, and also treatments to counter whatsoever chemical weapons that are used on U.s. troops. In the future, though, these humans-on-a-chip could really become the basis of fleshy, humanoid robots. Only last calendar month, Austrian researchers created small human brains from stalk cells. For now, because the microfluidic channels can't notwithstanding provide the same level of structural or nutrient/waste material send as blood vessels, there are some fairly astringent limitations on the complication of the organs.

In the future, though, information technology may well exist possible to build a human-on-a-fleck that rivals the complexity of real humans. If nosotros then plug that HoC into a humanoid robot, such as Atlas, there could exist some very interesting repercussions indeed.

At present read: DARPA reveals Avatar plan, robot soldiers incoming