“Wattendorf, a clean-cut, angular triathlete, is a program manager for the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the military’s far-out research wing. On this day, he’s speaking at a DARPA-sponsored conference called Biology Is Technology. And he’s telling the assembled group what he will reiterate in a one-on-one interview with me later: that the agency is on the verge of a revolutionary way of preventing mass outbreaks of diseases like Ebola. If the system worked, many pandemic scenarios could be crossed off the “How the Apocalypse Could Happen” list. Dystopian novels and sci-fi shows would need to find a new set of plot points.
Briefly, Wattendorf explains, DARPA’s system would work like this: powerful antibodies would be isolated from survivors of a communicable disease, and the plans for making those antibodies would be encoded in RNA or DNA, then pumped into people who might come into contact with the disease. The cells in these people’s bodies would suck in the genetic material and start cranking out these high-performing antibodies. Any single human’s immunological innovation could be spread to the rest of humanity, protecting us all. The process would be faster and cheaper than previous methods of making vaccines and it would be widely applicable to all kinds of Hot Zone-style emerging diseases.”
This isn’t new as a theoretical solution, but I guess it’s new as a massive-agency-infrastructure-
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