A “Leap” toward Humanity’s Destruction
The world’s richest medical research foundation, the Wellcome Trust, has teamed up with a pair of former DARPA directors who built Silicon Valley’s skunkworks to usher in an age of nightmarish surveillance, including for babies as young as three months old. Their agenda can only advance if we allow it.
JUNE 25, 2021
27
MINUTE READ
A UK nonprofit with ties to global corruption
throughout the COVID-19 crisis as well as historical and current ties to the UK eugenics movement launched a global
health-focused DARPA equivalent last year. The move went largely unnoticed by
both mainstream and independent media.
The Wellcome Trust, which has arguably been second
only to Bill Gates in its ability to influence events during the COVID-19
crisis and vaccination campaign, launched its own global equivalent of the
Pentagon’s secretive research agency last year, officially to combat the “most
pressing health challenges of our time.” Though first conceived of in 2018,
this particular Wellcome Trust initiative was spun off from
the Trust last May with
$300 million in initial funding. It quickly attracted two former DARPA
executives, who had previously served in the upper echelons of Silicon Valley,
to manage and plan its portfolio of projects.
This global health DARPA, known as Wellcome Leap,
seeks to achieve “breakthrough scientific and technological solutions” by or
before 2030, with a focus on “complex global health challenges.” The Wellcome
Trust is open about how Wellcome Leap will apply the approaches of
Silicon Valley and venture capital firms to the health and life science sector.
Unsurprisingly, their three current programs are poised to develop incredibly
invasive tech-focused, and in some cases overtly transhumanist, medical
technologies, including a program exclusively focused on using artificial
intelligence (AI), mobile sensors, and wearable brain-mapping tech for children
three years old and younger.
This Unlimited Hangout investigation
explores not only the four current programs of Wellcome Leap but also the
people behind it. The resulting picture is of an incredibly sinister project
that poses not only a great threat to current society but to the future of
humanity itself. An upcoming Unlimited Hangout investigation
will examine the history of the Wellcome Trust along with its role in recent
and current events.
Leap’s Leadership: Merging Man and Machine for the
Military and Silicon Valley
Regina Dugan’s Keynote at Facebook F8 2017. Source: YouTube
The ambitions of the Wellcome Leap are made clear by
the woman chosen to lead it, former director of the Pentagon’s DARPA, Regina
Dugan. Dugan began her career at DARPA in 1996; she led a counterterrorism task force
in 1999 before leaving DARPA about a year later. After departing DARPA, she
cofounded her own venture capital firm, Dugan Ventures, and then became special
adviser to the US Army’s vice chief of staff from 2001 to 2003, which coincided
with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2005, she created a
defense-focused tech firm called RedXDefense, which contracts with the military
and specifically for DARPA.
In 2009, under the Obama administration, Dugan
was appointed director of DARPA by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Much was made
over her being the first female director of the agency, but she is best
remembered at the agency for her so-called “Special Forces” approach to
innovation. During her tenure, she created DARPA’s now defunct Transformational
Convergence Technology Office, which focused on social networks, synthetic biology,
and machine intelligence. Many of the themes previously managed by that office
are now overseen by DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, which was created
in 2014 and focuses on everything “from programmable microbes to
human-machine symbiosis.” The Biological Technologies Office, like Wellcome
Leap, pursues a mix of “health-focused” biotechnology programs and
transhumanist endeavors.
Right before leaving the top role at DARPA,
Dugan greenlighted
the agency’s initial investments in mRNA
vaccine technology,
which led to DARPA’s investments in Pfizer and Moderna shortly thereafter. The DARPA scientist who
lobbied Dugan to back the program, Dan Wattendorf, now works as the director of Innovative Technology
Solutions at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
While Dugan’s efforts at DARPA are remembered fondly
by those in the national-security state, and also by those in Silicon Valley,
Dugan was investigated for conflicts of interest during her time as DARPA’s
director, as her firm RedXDefense acquired millions in Department of Defense
contracts during her tenure. Though she had recused herself from any formal
role at the company while leading DARPA, she continued to hold a significant
financial stake in the company, and a military investigation later
found she had
violated ethics rules to a significant degree.
Instead of being held accountable in any way, Dugan
went on to become a top executive at Google, where she was brought on to manage
Google’s Advanced Technology and Products
Group (ATAP),
which it had spun out of Motorola Mobility after Google’s acquisition of that
company in 2012. Google’s ATAP was modeled after DARPA and employed other
ex-DARPA officials besides Dugan.
At Google, Dugan oversaw several projects, including
what is now the basis of Google’s “augmented reality” business, then known
as Project Tango, as well as “smart”
clothing in which
multitouch sensors were woven into textiles. Another project that Dugan led
involved the use of a “digital tattoo” to unlock smartphones. Perhaps most controversially,
Dugan was also behind the creation of a “digital authentication pill.” According to
Dugan, when the pill
is swallowed, “your entire body becomes your authentication token.” Dugan
framed the pill and many of her other efforts at Google as working to fix “the
mechanical mismatch between humans and electronics” by producing technology
that merges the human body with machines to varying degrees. While serving in
this capacity at Google, Dugan chaired a panel at the 2013 Clinton Global Initiative called
“Game-Changers in Technology” and attended the
2015 Bilderberg meeting where AI was a main topic of discussion.
In 2016, Dugan left Google for Facebook where she was
chosen to be the first head of Facebook’s own DARPA-equivalent research agency,
then known as Building 8. DARPA’s ties to the origins of Facebook were
discussed in a recent Unlimited Hangout report. Under Dugan, Building 8 invested heavily in
brain-machine interface technology, which has since produced the company’s
“neural wearable” wristbands that claim to be able to anticipate movements of
the hand and fingers from brain signals alone. Facebook showcased
prototypes of
the project earlier this year.
Dugan left Facebook just eighteen months after joining
Building 8, announcing her
plans “to focus
on building and leading a new endeavor,” which was apparently a reference to
Wellcome Leap. Dugan later
said it was as
if she had been training for her role at Wellcome Leap ever since entering the
workforce, framing it as the pinnacle of her career. When asked in an interview earlier this year who the clients of Wellcome
Leap are, Dugan gave a long-winded answer but essentially responded that the
project serves the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, international
organizations such as the UN, and public-private partnerships.
In addition to her role at Wellcome, Dugan is
also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations-sponsored
taskforce on US Technology and Innovation policy, which was formed in 2019.
Other members include LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, McKinsey Institute Global Chairman James Manyika, former head of Google Eric Schmidt and President Biden’s controversial top science
adviser Eric Lander.
The other executive at Wellcome Leap, chief operating
officer Ken Gabriel, has a background closely tied to Dugan’s. Gabriel,
like Dugan, is a former program manager at DARPA, where he led the agency’s
microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) research from 1992 to 1996. He served as
deputy director of DARPA from 1995 to 1996 and became director of the
Electronics Technology Office from 1996 to 1997, where he was reportedly
responsible for about half of all federal electronics-technology investments.
At DARPA, Gabriel worked closely with the FBI and the CIA.
Ken Gabriel – COO of Wellcome Leap. Source: Wellcome Leap
Gabriel left DARPA for Carnegie Mellon University,
where he was in charge of the Office for Security Technologies in the aftermath
of September 11, 2001. That office was created after
9/11 specifically
to help meet the national-security needs of the federal government, according
to Carnegie Mellon’s announcement of the program. Around that same time,
Gabriel became regarded as “the architect of the MEMS industry” due to his past
work at DARPA and his founding of the MEMS-focused semiconductor company
Akustica in 2002. He served as Akustica’s chairman and chief technology officer
until 2009, at which time he returned to work at DARPA where he served as the
agency’s deputy director, working directly under Regina Dugan.
In 2012, Gabriel followed Dugan to Google’s Advanced
Technology and Products Group, which he was actually responsible for
creating. According to
Gabriel, Google
cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin tasked Gabriel with creating “a private
sector ground-up model of DARPA” out of Motorola Mobility. Regina Dugan was
placed in charge, and Gabriel again served as her deputy. In 2013, Dugan and
Gabriel co-wrote a piece for the Harvard
Business Review about
how DARPA’s “Special Forces” innovation approach could revolutionize both the
public and private sectors if more widely applied. Gabriel left Google in 2014,
well before Dugan, to serve as the president and CEO of Charles Stark Draper
Laboratories, better known as Draper Labs, which develops “innovative
technology solutions” for the national-security community, with a focus on
biomedical systems, energy, and space technology. Gabriel held that position
until he abruptly
resigned in 2020 to
co-lead Wellcome Leap with Dugan.
In addition to his role at Wellcome, Gabriel is also a
World Economic Forum “technology
pioneer” and on the board of directors of Galvani Bioelectronics, a joint venture of
GlaxoSmithKline, which is intimately linked to the Wellcome Trust, and the
Google subsidiary Verily. Galvani focuses on the development of “bioelectronic
medicines” that involve “implant-based modulation of neural signals” in an
overt push by the pharmaceutical industry and Silicon Valley to normalize transhumanist
“medicines.” The longtime chairman of the board of Galvani, on which Gabriel
serves, was Moncef Slaoui, who led the US COVID-19 vaccine development and
distribution program Operation Warp Speed. Slaoui was relieved of
his position at
Galvani this past March over well-substantiated claims of sexual harassment.
Jeremy Farrar, Pandemic Narrative Manager
While Dugan and Gabriel ostensibly lead the outfit,
Wellcome Leap is the brainchild of Jeremy Farrar and Mike Ferguson, who serve
as its directors. Farrar is the director of the Wellcome Trust itself, and
Ferguson is deputy chair of the Trust’s board of governors. Farrar has been director of the Wellcome Trust since
2013 and has been actively involved in critical decision making at the highest
level globally since the beginning of the COVID crisis. He is also an agenda contributor to the World Economic Forum and cochaired the WEF’s Africa meeting in 2019.
Farrar’s Wellcome Trust is also a WEF strategic
partner and cofounded the COVID Action Platform with the WEF. Farrar
was more recently behind the creation of Wellcome’s COVID-Zero
initiative,
which is also tied to the WEF. Farrar has framed that initiative as “an
opportunity for companies to advance the science which will eventually reduce
business disruption.” Thus far it has convinced titans of finance, including Mastercard
and Citadel, to invest millions in research and development at organizations
favored by the Wellcome Trust.
Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar with NTI Co-Chairman Sam Nunn, who
led the 2001 Dark Winter exercise.
Source: NTI.com
Some of Wellcome’s controversial medical-research
projects in Africa, as well as its ties to the UK eugenics movement, were
explored in a December article published at Unlimited Hangout. That
report also explores the intimate connections of Wellcome to the
Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, the use of which has now been restricted
or banned in several countries. As mentioned in the introduction, the Wellcome
Trust itself is the subject of an upcoming Unlimited Hangout investigation
(Part 2).
Jeremy Farrar, who was born in Singapore in 1961, had
previously been director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City, beginning in 1998. During that time, he authored
numerous epidemiological research papers. He claimed in a 2014 Financial
Times article that
his decision to move to Vietnam was due to his disdain for conference halls
full of white men. Southeast Asia was obviously a much less regulated
environment for someone in the medical-research industry wishing to indulge in
groundbreaking research. Although based in Vietnam, Farrar was sent by Oxford
to various locations around the globe to study epidemics happening in real
time. In 2009, when swine flu was wreaking havoc in Mexico, Farrar jumped on a
plane to dive
right into the action, something he also did for subsequent global outbreaks
of Ebola, MERS, and avian flu.
Over the past year, many questions have arisen
regarding exactly how much power Farrar wields over global public health
policy. Recently, the US president’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, was
forced to release his emails and
correspondence from
March and April 2020 at the request of the Washington Post. The
released emails reveal what appears to be a high-level conspiracy by some of
the top medical authorities in the US to falsely claim that COVID-19 could only
have been of zoonotic origin, despite indications to the contrary. The emails
were heavily redacted as such emails usually are, supposedly to protect the
information of the people involved, but the “(b)(6)” redactions also protect much
of Jeremy Farrar’s input into these discussions. Chris Martenson, economic
researcher and post-doctorate student of neurotoxicology and founder of Peak
Prosperity, has had some insightful comments on the matter, including
asking why such protection has been offered to Farrar given that
he is the director of a “charitable trust.” Martenson went on to question why
the Wellcome Trust was involved at all in these high-level discussions.
One Fauci email, dated February 25, 2020, and sent by
Amelie Rioux of the WHO, stated that Jeremy Farrar’s official role at that time
was “to act as the board’s focal point on the COVID-19 outbreak, to represent
and advise the board on the science of the outbreak and the financing of the
response.” Farrar had previously
chaired the WHO’s
Scientific Advisory Council. The emails also show the preparation, within a
ten-day period, of the SARS-CoV-2 “‘origins” paper, which was entitled “The Proximal Origin of
SARS-CoV-2” and was accepted for publication by Nature Medicine on
March 17, 2020. The paper claimed that the SARS-CoV-2 virus could only have
come from natural origins as opposed to gain-of-function research, a claim once
held as gospel in the mainstream but which has come under considerable scrutiny
in recent weeks.
Shaping the presentation of an origin story for a
virus of global significance is something Farrar has been involved with before.
In 2004–5, it was
reported that
Farrar and his Vietnamese colleague Tran Tinh Hien, the vice director at the
Hospital for Tropical Diseases, were the first to identify the re-emergence of
the avian flu (H5N1) in humans. Farrar has recounted the origin story on many
occasions, stating: “It was a little girl. She caught it from a pet duck that
had died and she’d dug up and reburied. She survived.” According to Farrar,
this experience prompted him to found a global network in conjunction with the
World Health Organization to “improve local responses to disease
outbreaks.”
An article published by Rockefeller University
Press’s Journal of Experimental Medicine in 2009 is
dramatically titled, “Jeremy Farrar: When Disaster Strikes.” Farrar, when
referring to the H5N1 origin story stated: “The WHO people—and this is not a criticism—decided
it was unlikely that the child had SARS or avian influenza. They left, but
Professor Hien stayed behind to talk with the child and her mum. The girl
admitted that she had been quite sad in the previous days with the death of her
pet duck. The girl and her brother had fought over burying the duck and,
because of this argument, she had gone back, dug up the duck, and reburied
it—probably so her brother wouldn’t know where it was buried. With that
history, Professor Hien phoned me at home and said he was worried about the
child. He took some swabs from the child’s nose and throat and brought them
back to the hospital. That night the laboratory ran tests on the samples, and
they were positive for Influenza A.”
With Farrar now having been revealed as an
instrumental part of the team that crafted the official story regarding the
origins of SARS-CoV-2, his previous assertions about the origin of past
epidemics should be scrutinized.
As the director of a “charitable trust,” Jeremy Farrar
is almost completely unaccountable for his involvement in crafting
controversial narratives related to the COVID crisis. He continues to be at the
forefront of the global response to COVID, in part by launching the Wellcome Leap Fund for “unconventional projects, funded at scale”
as an overt attempt to create a global and “charitable” version of DARPA.
Indeed, Farrar, in conceiving Wellcome Leap, has positioned himself to be just
as, if not more, instrumental in building the foundation for the post-COVID era
as he was in building the foundation for the COVID crisis itself. This is significant
as Wellcome Leap CEO Regina Dugan has labeled COVID-19 this generation’s “Sputnik moment” that
will launch a new age of “health innovation,” much like the launching of
Sputnik started a global technological “space age.” Wellcome Leap fully intends
to lead the pack.
“Rulers” of the Gene-Sequencing Industry
In contrast to the overt DARPA, Silicon Valley, and
Wellcome connections of the others, the chairman of the board of directors of
Wellcome Leap, Jay Flatley, has a different background. Flatley is the
long-time head of Illumina, a California-based gene-sequencing hardware and
software giant that is believed to currently dominate the field of genomics.
Though he stepped down from the board of Illumina in 2016, he has continued to
serve as the executive chairman of its board of directors. Flatley was the first
to be chosen for a leadership position at Wellcome Leap, and he was responsible
for suggesting Regina Dugan for the organization’s chief executive officer,
according to a recent
interview given by
Dugan.
Illumina Campus. Source: Glassdoor
As a profile on Illumina in the business magazine Fast
Company notes, Illumina “operates behind the scenes, selling hardware
and services to companies and research institutions,” among them 23andMe.
23andMe’s CEO, Anne Wojcicki, the sister of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and the
wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin, told Fast Company, “It’s
crazy. Illumina is like the ruler of this whole universe and no one knows
that.” The report notes that 23andMe, like most companies that offer DNA
sequencing and analysis to consumers, uses machines produced by Illumina.
In 2016, Illumina launched an
“aggressive” five-year plan to “bring genomics out of research labs and into doctors’
offices.” Given the current state of things, particularly the global push
toward gene-focused vaccines and therapies, that plan, which concludes this
year, could not have been any better timed. Illumina’s current CEO, Francis
DeSouza, previously
held key posts
at Microsoft and Symantec. Also in 2016, Illumina’s executive teams forecast a
future in which humans are gene tested from birth to grave for both health and
commercial purposes.
Whereas most companies have struggled financially
during the coronavirus pandemic, some have seen a massive increase in
profits. Illumina has witnessed its share price double since the start of the COVID crisis. The
company’s $1 billion plus in profits during the last tax year was obviously
helped by the quick approval of the NovaSEQ 6000
machines, which can test
a large number
of COVID samples more
quickly than other devices. An individual machine has a hefty price tag of
almost $1 million, and thus they are mostly found at elite
facilities, private labs, and top-tier universities.
Jay Flatley, Executive Chairman, Illumina, speaking at World Economic
Forum in Davos 2018. Source: WEF
In addition to his long-standing leadership role at
Illumina, Jay Flatley is also a “digital member” of the World Economic Forum as well as the lead
independent director of
Zymergen, a WEF “tech pioneer” company that is “rethinking biology and
reimagining the world.” Flatley, who has also attended several Davos
meetings, has addressed the WEF on the “promise of precision [i.e.,
gene-specific] medicine.” At another WEF
panel meeting,
Flatley, alongside UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock, promoted the idea of
making genomic sequencing of babies at birth the norm, claiming it had “the
potential to shift the healthcare system from reactive to preventative.” Some
at the panel called for the genomic sequencing of infants to eventually become
mandatory.
Aside from Flatley as an individual, Illumina as a company is a WEF partner and plays a key role in its platform regarding the future of health care. A top Illumina executive also serves on the WEF’s Global Future Council on Biotechnology.
A New HOPE
Wellcome Leap currently has four programs: Multi-Stage
Psych, Delta Tissue, 1KD, and HOPE. HOPE was the first program to be announced by
Wellcome Leap and stands for Human Organs, Physiology and Engineering.
According to the full program description, HOPE aims “to leverage the power of
bioengineering to advance stem cells, organoids, and whole organ systems and
connections that recapitulate human physiology in vitro and
restore vital functions in vivo.”
Source: Wellcome Leap, https://wellcomeleap.org/hope/
HOPE consists of two main
program goals.
First, it seeks to “bioengineer a multiorgan platform that recreates human
immunological responses with sufficient fidelity to double the predictive value
of a preclinical trial with respect to efficacy, toxicity and immunogenicity
for therapeutic interventions.” In other words, this bioengineered platform
mimicking human organs would be used to test the effects of pharmaceutical
products, including vaccines, which could create a situation in which animal
trials are replaced with trials on gene-edited and farmed organs. Though such
an advance would certainly be helpful in the sense of reducing often unethical
animal experimentation, trusting such a novel system to allow medical
treatments to go straight to the human-testing phase would also require
trusting the institutions developing that system and its funders.
As it stands now, the Wellcome Trust has too many ties
to corrupt actors in the pharmaceutical industry, having originally begun as
the “philanthropic” arm of UK drug giant GlaxoSmithKline, for anyone to trust
what they are producing without actual independent confirmation, given the
histories of some of their partners in fudging both animal and human clinical
trial data for vaccines and other products.
The second goal of HOPE is to open up the use of
machine-human hybrid organs for transplantation into human beings. That goal
focuses on restoring “organ functions using cultivated organs or
biological/synthetic hybrid systems” with the later goal of bioengineering a
fully transplantable human organ after several years.
Later on in the program description, however, the
interest in merging the synthetic and biological becomes clearer when it
states: “The time is right to foster synergies between organoids, bioengineering
and immunoengineering technologies, and advance the state-of-the-art of in
vitro human biology . . . by building controllable, accessible and
scalable systems.” The program description document also notes the interest of
Wellcome in genetic-engineering approaches for the “enhancement of desired
properties and insertion of traceable markers” and Wellcome’s ambition to
reproduce the building blocks of the human immune system and human organ
systems through technological means.
Transhumanist Toddlers?
The second program to be pursued by Wellcome Leap is
called “The First 1000 Days: Promoting Healthy Brain Networks,” which is
abbreviated as 1KD by the organization. It is arguably the most unsettling
program because it seeks to use young children, specifically infants from three
months to three-year-old toddlers, as its test subjects. The program is being
overseen by Holly Baines, who previously served as strategy development lead
for the Wellcome Trust before joining Wellcome Leap as the 1KD program
leader.
Source: Wellcome Leap, https://wellcomeleap.org/1kd/
1KD is focused
on developing
“objective, scalable ways to assess a child’s cognitive health” by monitoring
the brain development and function of infants and toddlers, allowing
practitioners to “risk-stratify children” and “predict responses to
interventions” in developing brains.
The program description document notes that, up to
this point in history, “our primary window into the developing brain has been
neuroimaging techniques and animal models, which can help identify quantitative
biomarkers of [neural] network health and characterise network differences
underlying behaviours.” It then states that advances in technology “are opening
additional possibilities in young infants.”
The program description goes on to say that artificial
neural networks, a form of AI, “have demonstrated the viability of modelling
network pruning process and the acquisition of complex behaviours in much the same
way as a developing brain,” while improvements in machine learning, another
subset of AI, can now be used to extract “meaningful signals” from the brains
of infants and young children. These algorithms can then be used to develop
“interventions” for young children deemed by other algorithms to be in danger
of having underdeveloped brain function.
The document goes on to note the promise of “low-cost
mobile sensors, wearables and home-based systems” in “providing a new
opportunity to assess the influence and dependency of brain development on
natural physical and social interactions.” In other words, this program seeks
to use “continuous visual and audio recordings in the home” as well as wearable
devices on children to collect millions upon millions of data points. Wellcome
Leap describes these wearables as “relatively unobtrusive, scalable electronic
badges that collect visual, auditory and motion data as well as interactive
features (such as turn-taking, pacing and reaction times).” Elsewhere in the document
there is a call to develop “wearable sensors that assess physiological measures
predictive of brain health (e.g., electrodermal activity, respiratory rate, and
heart rate) and wireless wearable EEG or eye-tracking technology” for use in
infants and children three and under.
Like other Wellcome Leap programs, this technology is
being developed with the intention of making it mainstream in medical science
within the next five to ten years, meaning that this system—although framed as
a way to monitor children’s brain functioning to improve cognitive outcomes—is
a recipe for total surveillance of babies and very young children as well as a
means for altering their brain functioning as algorithms and Leap’s programmers
see fit.
1DK has two main program goals. The first is to
“develop a fully integrated model and quantitive measurement tools of network
development in the first 1000 days [of life], sufficient to predict EF
[executive function] formation before a child’s first birthday.” Such a model,
the description reads, “should predict contributions of nutrition, the
microbiome and the genome” on brain formation as well as the effects of
“sensimotor and social interactions [or lack thereof] on network pruning
processes” and EF outcomes. The second goal makes it clear that widespread
adoption of such neurological-monitoring technologies in young children and
infants is the endgame for 1DK. It states that the program plans to “create
scalable methods for optimising promotion, prevention, screening and
therapeutic interventions to improve EF by at least 20% in 80% of children
before age 3.”
True to the eugenicist ties of the Wellcome Trust (to
be explored more in-depth in Part 2), Wellcome Leap’s 1DK notes that “of
interest are improvements from underdeveloped EF to normative or from normative
to well-developed EF across the population to deliver the broadest impact.” One
of the goals of 1DK is thus not treating disease or addressing a “global health
public challenge” but instead experimenting on the cognitive augmentation of
children using means developed by AI algorithms and invasive surveillance-based
technology.
Another unsettling aspect of the program is its plan
to “develop an in vitro 3D brain assembloid that replicates
the time formation” of a developing brain that is akin to the models developed
by monitoring the brain development of infants and children. Later on, the
program description calls this an “in-silico” model of a child’s brain,
something of obvious interest to transhumanists who see such a development as a
harbinger of the so-called singularity. Beyond that, it appears that this in-silico and
thus synthetic model of the brain is planned to be used as the “model” to which
infant and children brains are shaped by the “therapeutic interventions”
mentioned elsewhere in the program description.
It should be clear how sinister it is that an
organization that brings together the worst “mad scientist” impulses of both
the NGO and military-research worlds is openly planning to conduct such
experiments on the brains of babies and toddlers, viewing them as datasets and
their brains as something to be “pruned” by machine “intelligence.” Allowing
such a program to advance unimpeded without pushback from the public would mean
permitting a dangerous agenda targeting society’s youngest and most vulnerable
members to potentially advance to a point where it is difficult to stop.
A “Tissue Time Machine”
The third and second-most recent program to join the
Wellcome Leap lineup is called Delta Tissue, abbreviated by the organization as ΔT. Delta Tissue aims to create a platform that
monitors changes in human-tissue function and interactions in real time,
ostensibly to “explain the status of a disease in each person and better
predict how that disease would progress.” Referring to this platform as a
“tissue time machine,” Wellcome Leap sees Delta Tissue as being able to predict
the onset of disease before it occurs while also allowing for medical
interventions that “are targeted to the individual.”
Source: Wellcome Leap, https://wellcomeleap.org/delta-tissue/
Well before the COVID era, precision medicine or
medicine “targeted or tailored to the individual” has been a code phrase for
treatments based on patients’ genetic data and/or for treatments that alter
nucleic acid (e.g., DNA and RNA) function itself. For instance, the US
government defines
“precision medicine” as “an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that
takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle
for each person.” Similarly, a 2018 paper published in Technology notes
that, in oncology, “precision and personalized medicine . . . fosters the
development of specialized treatments for each specific subtype of cancer,
based on the measurement and manipulation of key patient genetic and omic data
(transcriptomics, metabolomics, proteomics, etc.).”
Prior to COVID-19 and the vaccine roll outs, the mRNA
vaccine technology used by the DARPA-funded companies Moderna and Pfizer were
marketed as being precision
medicine treatments and
were largely referred to as “gene therapies” in media reports. They were also promoted heavily as
a revolutionary method of treating cancer, making it unsurprising that the
Delta Tissue program at Wellcome Leap would use a similar justification to
develop a program that aims to offer tailored gene therapies to people before the
onset of a disease.
This Delta
Tissue platform works
to combine “the latest cell and tissue profiling technologies with recent
advances in machine learning,” that is, AI. Given Wellcome Leap’s connections
to the US military, it is worth noting that the Pentagon and Google, both former employers of Wellcome Leap CEO Regina
Dugan and COO Ken Gabriel, have been working together since last September on
using AI to predict disease in humans, first focusing on cancer before
expanding to COVID-19 and every disease in between. The Delta Tissue program
appears to have related ambitions, as its program description makes clear that
the program ultimately aims to use its platform for a host of cancers and
infectious diseases.
The ultimate goal of this Wellcome Leap program is “to
eradicate the stubbornly challenging diseases that cause so much suffering
around the world.” It plans to do this through AI algorithms, however, which
are never 100 percent accurate in their predictive ability, and with
gene-editing treatments, nearly all of which are novel and have not been well
tested. That latter point is important given that one of the main methods for
gene-editing in humans, CRISPR, has been found in numerous studies to cause
considerable damage to the DNA, damage that is largely irreparable (see here, here and here). It seems plausible that a person placed on such a
hi-tech medical treatment path will continue to need a never-ending series of
gene-editing treatments and perhaps other invasive hi-tech treatments to
mitigate and manage the effects of clumsy gene splicing.
Total Surveillance to Treat “Depression”
Wellcome Leap’s most recent program, launched just
this week, is called “Multi-Channel
Psych: Revealing Mechanisms of Anhedonia” and is officially focused on creating “complex,
biological” treatments for depression.
Source: Wellcome Leap, https://wellcomeleap.org/mcpsych/
Those behind Wellcome Leap frame the
problem they aim
to tackle with this program as follows:
“We understand that synaptic connections serve as the
currency of neural communication, and that strengthening or weakening
these connections can facilitate learning new behavioral strategies and ways of
looking at the world. Through studies in both animal models and humans, we
have discovered that emotional states are encoded in complex neural network
activity patterns, and that directly changing these patterns via brain
stimulation can shift mood. We also know that disruption of these
delicately balanced networks can lead to neuropsychiatric illness.” (emphasis
added)
They add that “biologically based treatments” for
depression “are not being matched to the biology of the human beings they’re
being used in,” and, thus, treatments for depression need to be tailored “to
the specific biology” of individual patients. They clearly state that what
needs to be addressed in order to make such personal modifications to treatment
is to gain “easy access to the biological substrate of depression—i.e. the
brain.”
Wellcome Leap’s program
description notes
that this effort will focus specifically on anhedonia, which it defines as “an
impairment in the effort-based reward system” and as a “key symptom of
depression and other neuropsychiatric illnesses.” Notably, in the fine print of
the document, Wellcome Leap states:
“While there are many definitions of anhedonia, we are
less interested in the investigation of reduced consummatory pleasure, the
general experience of pleasure, or the inability to experience pleasure.
Rather, as per the description above, we will prioritize investigations of
anhedonia as it relates to impairments in the effort-based reward system—e.g. reduced motivation to complete tasks and
decreased capacity to apply effort to achieve a goal.”
In other words, Wellcome Leap is only interested in
treating aspects of depression that interfere with an individual’s ability to
work, not in improving an individual’s quality or enjoyment of life.
Leap notes, in discussing its goals, that it seeks to
develop models for how patients respond to treatments that include “novel or
existing behavior modification, psychotherapy, medication, and neurostimulation
options” while also capturing an individual’s “genome, phenome [the sum of an
individual’s phenotypic traits], [neural] network connectivity, metabolome [the
sum of an individual’s metabolic traits], microbiome, reward processing
plasticity levels,” among others. It ultimately aims to predict the
relationship between an individual’s genome to how “reward processing”
functions in the brain. It implies that the data used to create this model
should involve the use of wearables, stating that researchers “should seek to
leverage high frequency patient-worn or in-home measurements in addition to
those obtained in the clinic, hospital or laboratory.”
One of the main research areas included in the program
looks to “develop new scalable measurement tools for reliable and high-density
quantification of mood (both subjectively reported and objectively quantified
via biometrics such as voice, facial expression, etc.), sleep, movement, reward
system functioning, effort/motivation/energy levels, social interaction,
caloric intake, and HPA axis output in real-world situations.” The HPA
(hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis is mentioned throughout the document, and this
is significant as it is both a negative and positive feedback system regulating
the mechanisms of stress reactions, immunity, and also fertility in the human
body. The latter is especially important given the Wellcome Trust’s ties to the
UK eugenics movement. It is also worth noting that some commercially available
wearables, such as Amazon’s Halo, already quantify mood, sleep, and movement.
The program’s authors go even further than the above
in terms of what they wish to monitor in real time, stating, “We specifically
encourage the development of non-invasive technology to directly interrogate
human brain state.” Examples include “a non-invasive spinal tap equivalent,”
“behavioral or biomarker probes of neural plasticity,” and “single-session
neural monitoring capabilities that define a treatment-predictive brain state.”
In other words, this Wellcome Leap program and its
authors seek to develop “non-invasive” and, likely, wearable technology capable
of monitoring an individual’s mood, facial expressions, social interactions,
effort and motivation, and potentially even thoughts in order to “directly
interrogate human brain state.” To think that such a device would stay only in
the realm of research is naive, especially given that WEF luminaries have openly
spoken at Davos meetings about how governments plan to use such technology widely on their
populations as a means of pre-emptively targeting would-be dissent and ushering
in an era of “digital dictatorships.”
The focus on treating only the aspects of depression
that interfere with a person’s work further suggests that such technology, once
developed, would be used to ensure “perfect worker” behavior in industries
where human workers are rapidly being replaced with AI and machines, meaning
the rulers can be more selective about which people continue to be employed and
which do not. Like other Wellcome Leap programs, if completed, the fruits of
the Multi-Channel Psych program will likely be used to ensure a population of
docile automatons whose movements and thoughts are heavily surveilled and monitored.
The Last Leap for an Old Agenda
Wellcome Leap is no small endeavor, and its directors
have the funding, influence, and connections to make their dreams reality. The
organization’s leadership includes the key force behind Silicon Valley’s push
to commercialize transhumanist tech (Regina Dugan), the “architect” of the MEMS
industry (Ken Gabriel), and the “ruler” of the burgeoning genetic-sequencing
industry (Jay Flatley). It also benefits from the funding of the world’s
largest medical-research foundation, the Wellcome Trust, which is also one of
the leading forces in shaping genetics and biotechnology research as well as
health policy globally.
A 1994 Sunday Times investigation into the Trust noted that “through [Wellcome
Trust] grants and sponsorships, government agencies, universities, hospitals
and scientists are influenced all over the world. The trust distributes more
money to institutions than even the British government’s Medical Research
Council.”
It then notes:
“In offices on the building’s first floor, decisions
are reached that affect lives and health on scales comparable with minor wars.
In the conference room, high above the street, and in the meeting hall, in the
basement, rulings in biotechnology and genetics are handed down that will help
shape the human race.”
Little has changed regarding the Trust’s influence
since that article was published. If anything, its influence on research paths
and decisions that will “shape the human race” has only grown. Its ex-DARPA
officials, who have spent their careers advancing transhumanist technology in
both the public and private sectors, have overlapping goals with those off
Wellcome Leap. Dugan’s and Gabriel’s commercial projects in Silicon Valley
reveal that Leap is led by those who have long sought to advance the same
technology for profit and for surveillance. This drastically weakens Wellcome
Leap’s claim to now be pursuing such technologies to only improve “global
health.”
Regina Dugan’s Keynote at Facebook F8 2017. Source: YouTube
Indeed, as this report has shown, most of these
technologies would usher in a deeply disturbing era of mass surveillance over
both the external and internal activities of human beings, including young
children and infants, while also creating a new era of medicine based largely
on gene-editing therapies, the risks of which are considerable and also
consistently downplayed by its promoters.
When one understands the intimate bond that has long
existed between eugenics and transhumanism, Wellcome Leap and its ambitions
make perfect sense. In a recent article written by John Klyczek for Unlimited Hangout, it was noted that the first director general of
UNESCO and former president of the UK Eugenics Society was Julian Huxley, who
coined the term “transhumanism” in his 1957 book New Bottles
for New Wine. As
Klyczek wrote, Huxley argued that “the eugenic goals of biologically
engineering human evolution should be refined through transhumanist
technologies, which combine the eugenic methods of genetic engineering with
neurotech that merges humans and machines into a new organism.”
Earlier, in 1946, Huxley noted in his
vision for UNESCO that it was essential that “the eugenic problem is examined with the
greatest care and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so
that much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable,” an astounding
statement to make so soon after the end of World War II. Thanks in large part
to the Wellcome Trust and its influence on both policy and medical research
over the course of several decades, Huxley’s dream of rehabilitating
eugenics-infused science in the post–World War II era could soon become
reality. Unsurprisingly, the Wellcome Trust hosts the archive of the formerly Huxley-led Eugenics Society
and still boasts close ties to its successor organization, the Galton
Institute.
The over-riding question is: Will we allow ourselves
to continue to be manipulated into allowing transhumanism and eugenics to be
openly pursued and normalized, including through initiatives like those of
Wellcome Leap that seek to use babies and toddlers as test subjects to advance
their nightmarish vision for humanity? If well-crafted advertising slogans and
media campaigns painting visions of utopia such as “a world without disease”
are all that is needed to convince us to give up our future and our children’s
future to military operatives, corporate executives, and eugenicists, then
there is little left of our humanity to surrender.
Author’s note: Johnny Vedmore contributed to this
report.
Featured photo: Antonio Cabrera for Unlimited Hangout
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