They Want to Make Your BODY Programmable — Who Holds the Controls?

By Lisa Haven

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, is moving into a new technological frontier that could eventually change the way scientists interact with the fundamental machinery of living organisms. DARPA has issued a public solicitation seeking proposals from companies, universities and researchers for a new program known as PENG, or Protein Engineering. At the heart of the project is an ambitious idea: developing a programmable way of editing proteins that already exist inside living cells.

To understand why this matters, think of DNA as the instruction manual for the body, while proteins are the “worker bees” carrying out many of those instructions. Instead of permanently rewriting DNA, PENG seeks ways of modifying the proteins already functioning inside cells. The goal is to potentially alter several proteins at once and temporarily turn certain biological functions up or down.

This isn’t simply another artificial-intelligence program designed to process information or generate content. The larger ambition is to use advanced computational and AI-assisted approaches to help make biological processes increasingly programmable. That raises an enormous question: if scientists eventually become capable of precisely changing what proteins do inside living organisms, where could that technology ultimately lead?

DARPA’s stated rationale includes potentially important medical and defensive applications. Imagine someone exposed to a dangerous toxin, infection, biological agent or chemical threat. Rather than permanently changing that person’s genes—or waiting for a conventional drug to take effect—future technology might allow scientists or physicians to temporarily modify particular proteins so that the body responds differently. The concept is that the altered proteins would eventually break down naturally and be replaced, allowing the intervention to be temporary rather than permanently encoded into someone’s DNA.

For now, however, there is an important distinction between the potential and the reality. PENG is still a research program, and the work described in the transcript does not involve human trials. DARPA’s stated 42-month objective is to produce a prototype demonstrated in tissue and/or animal models.

Nevertheless, the potential implications deserve serious consideration. If this research ultimately succeeds and later develops into technology applicable to humans, scientists could conceivably gain increasingly precise ways of regulating specific biological functions. That could lead to extraordinary medical breakthroughs and potentially save lives—but technologies powerful enough to manipulate biology also raise significant questions about how they might someday be misused.

One concern is consent. What safeguards would prevent future biological interventions from being administered without someone’s informed permission? Another is the possibility of a technology designed to restore biological function being repurposed to disrupt it. If scientists eventually learn how to regulate particular proteins or pathways, could future descendants of that technology interfere with immune, metabolic, neurological or cardiovascular functions rather than improve them?

Then there is the military dimension. A technology capable of protecting people against chemical or biological threats could have enormous defensive value. But sufficiently advanced biological technology could also raise dual-use concerns. Could future versions enhance strength, endurance, recovery, alertness or other human characteristics? Could biological interventions designed for protection eventually be adapted for offensive purposes? These remain hypothetical possibilities—not demonstrated capabilities of PENG—but they illustrate why programmable biology deserves scrutiny.

Artificial intelligence introduces yet another concern: mistakes. Human biology is extraordinarily complex, and altering one component can potentially have effects elsewhere. What happens when an AI-designed intervention produces an unexpected biological consequence? And if biological technologies eventually become genuinely “software-defined,” an entirely new security question emerges: could the instructions themselves someday become vulnerable to unauthorized manipulation?

There is also the issue of coercion. Governments, militaries, employers or other powerful institutions could theoretically pressure people to accept biological interventions they don’t want. Access could become another dividing line if biological enhancements or protective technologies were available only to certain governments, militaries or wealthy populations. And farther into the speculative future, combining sophisticated biological monitoring with programmable intervention raises even bigger questions about surveillance and bodily autonomy.

For Christians, this development also invites a much larger conversation.

Revelation 13 describes a future system characterized by extraordinary coercion, including a world in which the ability to buy and sell becomes connected to accepting the authority and mark of the Beast. That does not mean PENG is the Mark of the Beast, nor does Revelation tell us that protein engineering, artificial intelligence or any particular modern technology will become the mechanism behind it.

But for generations, Christians have wondered what kind of technological and societal infrastructure could make such sweeping control possible. Today, technologies are increasingly blurring the boundaries between computers, identity, surveillance, economics and now potentially biology.

That makes the question much larger than protein engineering.

For decades, debates about technological control largely centered around information: Who controls your data? Who monitors your communications? Who determines what you can access?

But imagine a future in which the question becomes: Who controls the technology interacting with your body?

That is where the promise and danger of programmable biology collide. Technology capable of temporarily manipulating biological functions could someday produce remarkable treatments for disease, poisoning and other serious medical conditions. But the same underlying capability would demand extraordinary safeguards surrounding informed consent, cybersecurity, government authority and individual autonomy.

DARPA has not created technology capable of controlling human beings, and the current PENG research described here does not involve human trials. What researchers are pursuing is a general-purpose approach toward precise, programmable editing of existing proteins—an attempt to make protein engineering considerably more versatile than it is today.

And perhaps that is precisely why this story deserves attention now, rather than after the technology has matured.

Scientific breakthroughs frequently arrive with tremendous benefits alongside questions their creators never anticipated. Programmable biology could someday become one of medicine’s most powerful tools. It could potentially save countless lives.

But the question society must confront before that future arrives is equally profound:

If we eventually make human biology programmable, who gets to hold the controls?

This isn’t necessarily a reason to panic. But it is certainly a reason to pay attention. Because as the boundary separating technology from human biology becomes increasingly thin, the decisions made today could determine whether tomorrow’s breakthroughs remain tools serving humanity—or become something humanity struggles to control.