Russia plans to develop "genetic passports" for military personnel, according to Alexander Sergeyev, the head of the country's Academy of Sciences. The program also involves the Kirov Military Medical Academy, which conducts research in military medical services.
Speaking ahead of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), Sergeyev said that "the most important and interesting project considered by representatives of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Military Academy, is the so-called Genetic Passport of a soldier. The project is far-reaching, scientific, fundamental. Its essence is to find such genetic predispositions among military personnel, which will allow them to be properly oriented according to military specialties."
In March, Russia's President Vladimir Putin issued a decree on "chemical and biological safety for the period up to 2025," which introduced the concept of genetic passports for all citizens.
TASS reported at the time that this was "part of the state management system regarding Russia’s national security... aimed at protecting the country’s people and environment from the negative impact of dangerous chemical and biological factors, creating and developing systems to monitor chemical and biological risks, as well as at boosting bilateral and international cooperation in the area of chemical and biological security."
"The [military] project involves not only the assessment of the physiological state," Sergeyev told TASS this week, "but also the prediction of human behavior in stressful, critical situations that are associated with the military profession."
The military passports would predict a soldier's "resistance to stress, ability to perform physical and mental operations under the conditions of this stress, and so on." Sergeyev told the news agency that he believed "military medicine will be able to raise the bar high in this project. There are already serious developments in this area. It is about understanding at the genetic level who is more prone to, for example, to service in the fleet, who may be more prepared to become a paratrooper or a tankman."
In a separate interview with the RIA Novosti news agency, Sergeyev said that this would determine "whether a serviceman will be better than a rifleman or tankman—after all, the wars of the future are already largely wars of intellects, those people who make decisions in conditions completely different from those that were before."
Sergeyev also said that "a soldier’s stress is connected, say, with the artillery preparation of an opponent who wanted to crush you, make him stay out of the trench, but in a cyber war the stresses are completely different," and there are also plans for "work in this area."
"I believe that technological lag is today the main threat to our national security," Sergeyev told TASS, "because the world is moving very fast on the rails of scientific and technological progress."
SPIEF runs from June 6-8.
