Not content with creating Terminator-like soldiers such as Atlas, and the Avatar mind-meld program that allows human soldiers to control their robotic equivalents from afar, the US Army is now working on a human-on-a-chip. These HoCs will ostensibly be used to safely test new chemical weapons, and to explore possible treatments for exposure to chemical weapons, but long-term it’s easy to imagine that these chips will be used as the basis for sentient, human-like robot soldiers — much like the humanoid Cylon “skinjobs” in Battlestar Galactica.

Updated: The US Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, where the research is being carried out, has contacted us to say that they do not create chemical weapons. They say that the HoCs will only be used for defensive purposes. They also claim that US in general does not produce chemical weapons, in accordance with the Chemical Weapons Convention — but it still has a rather large stockpile.

In recent years, a lot of time and money has been plowed into organs-on-a-chip — small plastic chips that contain cells from that specific human organ, cultured from induced pluriopotent stem cells (iPSC), with small microfluidic channels acting like blood vessels, ferrying nutrients and waste products to and from the organs. While these OoCs aren’t exactly the same as your lungs or heart, they provide a much more accurate (and ethical) testbed than animals for trialing new chemical weapons and pharmaceuticals. For more info, see our story discussing how the organ-on-a-chip could replace animal testing.

Now, it seems, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defense, working with Harvard and other institutions with OoC chops, and funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), wants to put a bunch of OoCs on a single chip to create a human-on-a-chip. There aren’t a whole lot of details at the moment, but it sounds like the US Army wants to develop the living equivalent of a motherboard, with individual sockets for OoCs that are connected via microfluidic blood vessels. Going by the diagram, which is really all we have at the moment, the Army will begin with a single device (is that the right word?) that features a human heart, lungs, and liver.

OoCs and HoCs are useful because they allow for the easy, safe, and repeatable testing of new chemicals and drugs without harming animals or actual humans. Testing is as simple as introducing the new compound into the microfluidic “blood stream,” and then watching how the organs react — whether they become inflamed, hemorrhagic, etc. Because the chips are transparent, and not inside a thoroughly opaque and alive human, it’s much easier to observe the effects of the new compound.

The ostensible goal, of course, is to improve the turnaround time of new chemical warfare agents, and also treatments to counter any chemical weapons that are used on US troops. In the future, though, these humans-on-a-chip could actually become the basis of fleshy, humanoid robots. Just last month, Austrian researchers created small human brains from stem cells. For now, because the microfluidic channels can’t yet provide the same level of structural or nutrient/waste transport as blood vessels, there are some fairly severe limitations on the complexity of the organs.

In the future, though, it may well be possible to build a human-on-a-chip that rivals the complexity of real humans. If we then plug that HoC into a humanoid robot, such as Atlas, there could be some very interesting repercussions indeed.

Now read: DARPA reveals Avatar program, robot soldiers incoming