Anthropology professor Andrew Bickford is spending 2014-2015 at the Woodrow Wilson Center. His research project is "Skin-In Solutions: Biotechnology, Psychopharmacology, and Armored Life in the United States Military."
This project examines the cultural, policy, and ethical implications of United States military medical research programs – “Skin-In Solutions” – designed to improve combat enhancement and resilience. It provides an analysis of current United States military medicine programs, biotechnologies, psychopharmacology, and other forms of technology designed to improve and enhance soldiers’ combat capabilities and ability to resist trauma, both during and after combat. The project also analyzes the discussions, debates, conceptions, and understandings of trauma and combat in the military, and how military officials, military medical professionals, and other researchers discuss, imagine, and conceive of ways to make “super soldiers” who can better withstand combat and combat trauma. Finally, the project examines current and planned attempts to develop medical technologies that aim to make the experience of war trauma a thing of the past, and considers what it might mean to be an “enhanced” soldier who no longer experiences psychological trauma.
January 08, 2015
