by Jon Fleetwood, Jon Fleetwood:
What happens when computer models—not symptoms—become the basis for quarantine?
In 2016, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched PROMETHEUS (here), a military research program designed to determine whether a person was “likely to spread disease” without exhibiting symptoms of illness, with the stated goal of enabling quarantine and medical interventions.
The revelation follows HHS’s recent quarantine of a symptomless American against her will after testing negative for hantavirus.
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PROMETHEUS represents one of the clearest examples in DARPA’s biotechnology portfolio of an effort to move purported infectious disease response away from waiting for observable illness and toward “predictive” analysis of claimed genetic changes occurring inside the human body.
It also raises broader questions about how governments may increasingly rely on computer models—rather than observable clinical evidence—to make drastic public health determinations.
It also raises obvious questions:
- What happens when a computer says you’re contagious but you have no symptoms?
- Could governments eventually quarantine or medically intervene based on that prediction?
- And if the computer is wrong, how would you ever prove it?
Predicting Contagiousness Before Symptoms
DARPA summarized the program’s objective in unusually direct language.
According to the agency’s PROMETHEUS webpage:
“The Prometheus program aims to improve military readiness and force health through development of a prognostic that can determine if an individual is contagious before he exhibits symptoms of illness.”
The agency further explained:
“DARPA’s goal is to develop a molecular test for determining if an individual is likely to spread disease following exposure to an infectious agent and predict within 24 hours of exposure if that individual will become contagious.”
According to DARPA, the capability would allow military planners to identify potentially contagious individuals before they transmitted disease within the close quarters common in military operations.
The accompanying Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) similarly states that the program sought to:
“…develop a molecular host prognostic assay to measure infectious disease contagiousness” and identify individuals “in advance of diagnostics or symptom reporting for potential interventions.”
Rather than waiting for symptoms or conventional diagnosis, PROMETHEUS proposed using molecular biomarkers to predict contagiousness before either occurred.
Looking Inside the Human Body
To accomplish that, DARPA proposed identifying a minimal collection of biological signals capable of forecasting contagiousness shortly after exposure.
According to the agency:
“Prometheus specifically aims to discover a minimal set of biological signals in a person recently infected with disease that would indicate the potential for contagiousness…”
Those biological signals—or biomarkers—would be identified by characterizing a person’s genetic and molecular immune responses over time.
The BAA describes measuring messenger RNA, host genetic mutations, immune-response proteins, cytokines, metabolites, genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, epigenomics, and pre-existing immunity to identify early molecular signatures associated with future contagiousness.
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