Take the Fountain of Youth, throw in some Blade Runner and you have the Department of Defense’s latest futuristic concept for warfare. Known as “BioDesign,” the program by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) seeks to create “synthetic organisms” that can either live forever, or die exactly when their masters want, not unlike “replicants” in the 1982 sci-fi classic. Military researchers also want the organisms to have special DNA that can tell commanders what they’ve been doing and be incapable of being reprogrammed by the enemy. The new DARPA budget has $6 million set aside for BioDesign, plus $20 million for a new synthetic biology program.