DARPA’s latest call for proposals merited an interesting article in the Toronto Star.  The advanced projects agency has requested labs to submit research plans that will lead to :

the controlled arrival of an insect within five metres of a specified target located 100 metres away. It must then remain stationary indefinitely, unless otherwise instructed … to transmit data to sensors providing information about the local environment.

The preferred methodology is to implant computational units in the larvae and allow them to integrate with the nervous system through pupation.  A high goal indeed and one that is so far from any proven science that it certainly qualifies as ‘blue sky’ research.  Last year DARPA gave out 3.1 billion for equally outside the box, high concept research.  The Star article compares this to $325 million in similarly unconventional funding from the Canadian government.  John Polanyi, the Nobel Prize winning Canadian chemist points out that :

The long-term, out-of-the-box approach is why the U.S. is the world leader in science. Canada thinks in the short term. It’s all about wealth creation here, having business models, setting milestones for work even before it’s begun.

It is my strong belief that the most basic sort of research has to be funded at very high levels to feed ideas and capabilities into the engine of commercially applied research. DARPA is clearly an agency that manages to do this quite well. A strict accounting of the money they spend would reveal a host of failed initiatives, the by products of these are staples of research science and have had wholly unintended consequences.

TheStar.com - Uncle Sam’s scientists busy building insect army.