The U.S. Department of Defense is exploring on the intersection of biology
and physical sciences to improve national defense. Thus, they have opened
the Biological Technologies Office (BTO) as a new division of the U.S.
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is responsible for
new technologies for use by the military.

According to the official statement of DARPA, BTO aims to harness the power
of biological systems by applying the rigorous tools of engineering and
related disciplines, and to design next-generation technologies that are
inspired by insights gained from the life sciences. BTO's programs will
operate across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales-from individual
cells to humans and other organisms and the communities in which they
operate, and from the time it takes for a nerve to fire to the time it may
take a new virus to spread around the world one sneeze at a time.

[www.darpa.mil]