DARPA’s internal findings explaining why it rejected Project DEFUSE (proposal HR001118S0017-PREEMPT-FP-019, $14.2M requested). Despite two of three reviewers judging the underlying goal (reducing viral shedding in bat caves) “of interest,” DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office declined to fund it because the proposed synthesis of spike glycoproteins binding human receptors and their insertion into SARSr-CoV backbones “potentially” constituted gain-of-function/dual-use-research-of-concern (DURC) work that the proposal neither flagged nor addressed; it also lacked a DURC risk-mitigation plan, barely discussed ethical/legal/social issues, and left data-analysis and vaccine-delivery-variability questions unresolved. Funding of “certain components of particular interest” was left open, conditional on a DURC risk-mitigation plan with a “responsible communications plan.”
relevance_note: A federal funder’s own contemporaneous (2018) institutional judgment that the DEFUSE-proposed work was GoF/DURC-adjacent — independent corroboration that this was a live, discussed risk at the time, not retrospective overreading by lab-leak proponents.