(LifeSiteNews) – The U.S. government just boosted research efforts to map the human brain, which observers note will allow scientists to “directly alter neural function using digital devices,” a transhumanist achievement.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently launched “BRAIN 2.0” (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnology), giving $600 million in fresh funding to accelerate and expand a program launched in 2014 under the Obama administration. The initiative aims to map our 86 billion neurons and understand “how they’re different,” and how they’re organized, according to Stat News.
The project’s most immediate aims are therapeutic, with ongoing efforts to digitally generate speech from the totally paralyzed, for example, or alleviate severe depression with electrical jolts. But, as Obama pointed out during BRAIN’s unveiling, research opens the possibility to unexpected inventions: “The Apollo project that put man on the moon gave us, eventually, CAT scans,” he noted at the time.
BRAIN’s scope includes projects under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), including a program to develop an implantable neural interface to provide “data transfer” “between the brain and the digital world,” essentially allowing electronic “mind reading” as well as “mind control” of electronics.
Justin Sanchez, the director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, had predicted that brain interface technology will not be limited to therapeutic use for those suffering from impairments, but will change day-to-day living for society as a whole.
“We’ve laid the groundwork for a future in which advanced brain interface technologies will transform how people live and work,” Sanchez noted as DARPA awarded grants in 2017 to help develop “an implantable system able to provide precision communication between the brain and the digital world.”
Elon Musk, who is developing a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) implant called Neuralink, has gone so far as to predict in 2020 that implant usage would expand to allow the general population to “telepathically” communicate with each other within “five to 10 years” if progress went smoothly.
Such brain interfaces would help “Bridg[e] the Bio-Electronic Divide,” as DARPA describes it.
If successful, the atlas created by BRAIN 2.0 will be a crucial bridge across this “bio-electronic divide.” The neural territory will be mapped and ready to conquer,” remarked Joe Allen in commentary on government-funded brain research projects for The Federalist.
Widespread use of BCIs has dangerous potential, at the very least because, as Kathleen Philips, VP of Research and Development at Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (imec) has admitted, electronic implants such as those being funded by BRAIN and developed by DARPA can be hacked by malicious third parties. Philips pointed out that former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s pacemaker was modified to “prevent hacking.”
Philips, who wrote about the benefits of BCIs for the World Economic Forum (WEF), proposed as a solution to such dangers the “guidance” of “overarching or independent institutions” to help create an “ethical framework” surrounding such technology, such as an action plan already launched by the Council of Europe.
Paul Joseph Watson of Summit News remarked that the “support and vision” for such tech called for by Philips would be “provided by your technocratic overlords, the same people who are desperately trying to censor the internet so they can’t be criticized,” referring to the WEF’s call for the merging of human and artificial intelligence to censor “hate speech” and “misinformation.”
BRAIN 2.0 is only one of the latest government-funded leaps toward transhumanism, an effort to, as Dr. Joseph Mercola has explained, “transcend biology through technology.” In other words, transhumanism is “the power to re-engineer our bodies and brains, whether it is with genetic engineering or by directly connecting brains to computers,” as World Economic Forum advisor Yuval Noah Harari told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes last year.
Three weeks ago, President Joe Biden issued an executive order calling for biotechnology that can “predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers,” using the toxic mRNA so-called “vaccines” as an example.
Allen also drew attention to the creation of The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) earlier this year as a component of the NIH, which “will be tasked with building high-risk, high-reward capabilities (or platforms) to drive biomedical breakthroughs.”
ARPA-H’s inaugural director, Renee Wegryzn, appeared to suggest one of her main priorities when she declared during a National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity Meeting, “The perspective that I bring here is really, we’re ushering in the century of engineered biology, whether it’s through gene-editing, or it’s through engineering of living medicines that will be in our gut … ”
“What else does this “century of engineered biology” hold in store?” According to Wegrzyn … this revolution will lead to “human-machine convergence” and the creation of “Human 2.0,” wrote Allen, citing her prediction, while she worked at DARPA, that such a merging of man and machine was “on the horizon,” something that ““that genome engineering and gene-editing will be a part of.”