The Pentagon's Brain by Annie Jacobsen

It created 10 million vaccines for the H1N1 influenza virus in one month. DARPA challenged itself to transform this model. So if you have an emerging disease that all of a sudden appears, that's a long time to get vaccines into the population. When the government needed emergency help with vaccines, it turned to DARPA.ĪNNIE JACOBSEN: It takes roughly nine months to produce and market a new vaccine. It's known because much of its work creeps eventually into civilian life, including the Internet. It's unknown because so much of its work is classified. She wrote a history of the agency called "The Pentagon's Brain." It explores an agency that is known and not known at all. Annie Jacobsen tried to find out what they're up to.

Our colleague, Steve Inskeep, brings us this look into an agency that aims to transform fantasy into reality.ĭARPA hires scientists and defense contractors to develop new weapons and new technology. Military, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known more simply as DARPA. We are going to consider now a highly secret branch of the U.S.