Chemical Heroes: Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military
The US military has long imagined and sought ways to create “supersoldiers.” The goal is to create a new kind of soldier with different expectations of performance, capabilities, and survivability. In Chemical Heroes, I examine US military biomedical and pharmacological projects intended to develop soldiers who can fight better, longer, and smarter than the enemy, and withstand environmental and disease stressors that could keep them out of action. These projects are also intended to counter perceptions of human frailty on the battlefield. Employing a kind of anticipatory military biomedicine, these projects call for the embedding of “inbuilt” and “unseen” biomedical armor and prophylaxes in the body of the soldier, such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s proposed ADAPTOR project, which envisions embedded bioelectronics to counter a variety of waterborne illnesses. As the US military increasingly sees the entire globe as a battlefield, it must anticipate, imagine, and design new biomedical and pharmacological protections and enhancements for soldiers in order to make them deployable and combat effective anywhere in the world. These projects give us a chance to think about how the military imagines, designs, and “make” our soldiers, thinsk about questions of security and insecurity as played out on and in the bodies of soldiers, and ultimately, what we are willing to do and accept in order to achieve desired military/political effects and outcomes.
Date: 9.07.2026, 17:30–18:30 CEST
Speaker
Prof. Andrew Bickford
Department of Anthropology, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA
Prof. Andrew Bickford received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Rutgers University in 2002. Dr. Bickford conducts research on war, militarization, health, biotechnology, bioethics, security, espionage, and the state in the United States and Germany. His current research examines biotechnology research in the United States military, and the bioethics of the military’s efforts to develop and make “super soldiers.” Prof. Bickford’s fieldwork in Germany with former East German army officers examined how states “make” and “unmake” soldiers, and the experiences of military elites who had power and lost it.
Prof. Bickford was a 2017 Summer Institute of Museum Anthropology Faculty Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution. Prof. Bickford was a 2014-2015 Residential Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and from 2002-2004, a National Institutes of Mental Health post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health. Prof. Bickford has also received grants and fellowships from Fulbright, the Social Science Research Council Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and Georgetown University.
Prof. Bickford is the author of Chemical Heroes: Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military(Duke University Press, 2020, named a CHOICE Magazine 2021 Outstanding Academic Title) and Fallen Elites: The Military Other in Post-Unification Germany (Stanford University Press, 2011). He is also the co-author (with the Network of Concerned Anthropologists) of The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual, or, Notes on Demilitarizing American Society (University of Chicago Press/Prickly Paradigm Press, 2009).
About: Digital Emotional Governance Seminar Series
Join us for an online seminar series exploring how emotions are measured, managed, and mobilized through digital technologies and data-driven governance. Sessions will examine topics such as affective and embodied computing, algorithmic decision-making, biometric surveillance, histories and futures of affect cultures, the strengths and weaknesses of anticipatory ethics, digital and embodied warfare, and the politics of emotional AI. The seminars are online and open to all.
With these talks we will generate discussion on the implications of emerging emotion sensing technologies for public policy, ethics, and everyday life in a digitally mediated world. Speakers provide critical perspectives on technology, governance, and society. Engage with leading thinkers and contribute to global conversations on the future of digital emotional governance.
Organisers
Tabea Bork-Hüffer
Heidelberg University
Tabea is Co-Director of the Heidelberg Centre of the Environment, founding member and Co-Investigator at the Camilla and Georg Jellinek Centre for Ethics.
Jessica Pykett
University of Birmingham
Jessica is Co-Director of the Centre for Urban Wellbeing, and Principal Investigator of the ESRC Ethics and Expertise project.
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