Thoughts on Genetically Engineered Soldiers
I had a conversation with game designer on Discord the other day. They asked for ideas on what kinds of genetic modifications soldiers of the future might have. I gave it a few minutes of thought, as well as some reflection on conversations I had in college with bioengineering students. The caveat, however, is that predicting medicine and science more than, say, 60 years in the future is pretty much impossible. Predictions tend to be expansions on ideas and science that already exist, and there’s no way of knowing what new ideas might become vogue 100 years from now. In essence, 1000 years and 10000 years are pretty much the same.
First off, here’s what I see as ‘problematic’ in terms of science fiction. A lot of the ‘genetic engineering’ and ‘supersoldier’ ideas are essentially power fantasies that aren’t grounded in the reality of combat (not that I know anything about combat and warfare first-hand). Wars are won by logistics and morale. Soldiers will get shot, and when they do, the difference between losing access to the asset you’ve trained for years and getting them back on the battlefield is based on A. good first aid, B. getting them to a doctor or surgeon, and C. the quality of care. Sure, individual soldiers might appreciate a genetic predisposition towards having muscles, but from the perspective of the strategist, this metabolically expensive modification is probably lower priority than one, that say, fixes the issue of blood types.
In a fiction that involves a genetically modified super-army, there are three key genetic priorities that I foresee. None of them are super strength, increased tolerance for pain, nightvision, or any other ‘super-soldier’ tropes.
Fixing the Heat problem. Humans and other animals depend on proteins and enzymes for bodily functions. The problem is that these operate in a narrow range of temperatures: too hot and the protein will bend, break (denature), or fail to correctly interact with other proteins and substances; too cold and the process will slow down and result in organ failure. If scientists can create ‘designer’ versions of existing proteins and cells that do the same functions they normally do, albeit at a greater temperature range, anyone affected will have hugely greater tolerance for extreme environments (whether the inside of a combat vehicle, or the hot jungle) and will be far less susceptible to exhaustion.
Fixing the Rejection problem. Blood types are so important in battlefield medical care that they are printed on dog tags. Acquiring, storing, and accurately administering blood is a logistical problem that can can be streamlined, in part, by changing how humans recognize foreign biological substances and react to them. When a person gets an organ transplant, they need to match blood types, or suffer from transplant rejection. Bodies also recognize markers on individual cells (and no, a transplanted organ doesn’t eventually ‘lose’ all of its foreign cells, otherwise stem research wouldn’t be so lucrative), which can eventually lead to transplant rejection later even if the transplant is initially successful. Today, we suppress the response with immunosuppressive drugs.
If, for example, soldiers were genetically modified to have the same blood type and recognize a specific ‘key’ on lab grown organs (a developing technology) as ‘safe’, lifesaving medical care on the battlefield wear massive traumatic injuries are relatively common, extreme procedures would be much more survivable and easier to recover from. This might be done in other ways, but solutions like printing organs with cells from the eventual recipient are a logistical nightmare for an army.
Fixing the Shell Shock problem. Modern all-volunteer armies are some of the highest quality fighting forces the world has even seen. American soldiers have live-fire exercises and are exposed to real chemical weapons. With years of training and screening, it’s possible to mitigate the risk of psychological distress on the battlefield, but in spite of that, it’s still a huge issue for veterans and active duty soldiers. Even today, scientists can analyze the genetic code of human embryos and guess (with greater success than random guessing) whether the person is more or less susceptible to suffer from certain mental issues. Even if all the risk-factors are present, there’s still a good chance the person will not have any mental disorders, so its not considered ethical or even particularly viable.
That said, some of these risk-factors are things like stress regulators, genes that influence how much of certain hormones we release in response to stimuli. If these can be targeted by gene-editing (or even cheaply screened on ‘sign-up’), soldiers might suffer less and bounce back quicker if they do.
These ‘gene-edits’ are not as fantastical as super strength or feel-no-pain (both of which might actually be bad ideas, but that’s a story for future post), but I do think they are in the bounds of possibility. Let me know what you think in the comments. Are there simpler solutions to any of these? What kinds of battlefield problems are worth it to edit? Which aren’t. For example, I don’t see why night vision is necessary when the future might hold night vision sunglasses.