From blockbuster to biotech breakthroughs | Ep 91

Intro Voices

Coming to DARPA is like grabbing the nose cone of a rocket and holding on for dear life.

DARPA is a place where if you don't invent the internet, you only get a “B.”

A DARPA program manager quite literally invents tomorrow.

Coming to work every day and being humbled by that.

DARPA is not one person or one place. It's a collection of people that are excited about moving technology forward.

Tom Shortridge
Hello and welcome to voices from DARPA. I'm your host, Tom Shortridge. Today we're talking with Doctor Mike Feasel, program manager in DARPA's Biological Technologies Office. His path began not with a clear destination, but with a process of elimination.  

As a pre-med student at the University of Texas, he was surrounded by future doctors, yet felt the pull of a different kind. He enjoyed the science, but lacked the singular drive for medicine. It was a single, almost forgotten hour in an inorganic chemistry class that first illuminated a new possibility. A five minute discussion on the world's most potent pesticides - nerve agents - sparked a profound realization. Somewhere, someone's job was to stand between these terrifying compounds and the rest of humanity. That idea took root - the seed of a career he didn't yet know existed.

Michael Feasel
This actually goes way back to when I was in my undergraduate degree program. I was at the University of Texas at Austin. I was a pre-med biochemistry major, and about halfway through the program, sometime during my sophomore junior year, I decided I didn't want to go to medical school. That's what all my friends were doing. And it wasn't something that I had that, you know, gung ho mentality about.

So I thought, well, what else is there? What else could I do with that scientific background? Because I really did enjoy the biochemistry program.  

My junior year, I decided I was going to take this elective on inorganic chemistry, and one day out of the whole semester was dedicated to organophosphates. And organophosphates are pesticides. And of this hour and a half long lecture, the last five minutes we talked about really potent pesticides, which are nerve agents. And after this lecture, I was just so enamored with this concept of, wow, there are some really powerful things out there that can be very harmful. Someone's researching this. Someone's job is to look at these really nasty compounds and protect people from them.

Tom Shortridge
That academic curiosity, born in a lecture hall, was about to collide with a blockbuster dose of Hollywood inspiration.

Michael Feasel
I was watching a movie with my roommate at the time, and this movie was the Rock, starring Nic Cage and Sean Connery and Ed Harris, amongst others. And it's all about this rogue marine general who steals a bunch of nerve gas and takes Alcatraz, the old prison, hostage, for a whole lot of money. It was in this movie, as I'm watching it as a sophomore in college, where there are a couple lines that popped up here and there where I was like, hey, me and Nick cage are a lot in common.

The first was when they were reading his credentials and they said, oh, he has a bachelor's in biochemistry and a PhD in toxicology. And I was like, I have a bachelor’s - I'm about to have a bachelor's in biochemistry. Toxicology sounds like the next logical step. Okay, cool.

Clip from “The Rock”
I'm just a biochemist. Most of the time to work in a glass jar and lead a very uneventful life. Drive a Volvo. Beige one. But what I'm dealing with here is one of the most deadly substances the Earth has ever known. So what do you say you cut me some friggin’ slack?

Michael Feasel
And I said, I drive a Volvo. This is amazing. And? And he's obsessed with the Beatles. And he loves records and swears that they sound better than any other media format. And I'm like, yep, totally agree. Me and Nic Cage will get along great. Or Stanley Goodspeed. And so that is what almost led me to start pursuing all of this.

I immediately started looking up, okay, where does this job actually exist? Yeah, this is a Disney movie. It's fictional. The job like that exists somewhere - more likely than not, in the government. So I started. You know, he worked for the FBI. Turns out, yeah, they're the big guys who do this. But largely the Army's responsible for chem bio.

Tom Shortridge
With the image of Stanley Goodspeed as a guide. Mike began searching for the real-world equivalent of the movie's hero. He knew the job existed somewhere in the vast machinery of the U.S. government, likely within the Army. But the path from a general idea to a specific job title remained unclear. The breakthrough wouldn't come from a government careers website or a formal application, but from a place of tradition and happenstance: the family Thanksgiving table.

Michael Feasel
And so I went home for Thanksgiving, and I was sitting around the table with my family, and my dad's golf buddy came over, and he was a former Army infantryman and I mentioned to him, hey, I'm kind of interested in in chem biodefense. Do you know anything? Know anybody? And he goes, you know, I was an infantry man.

I don't know much about it except my buddy Steve. He knows something about chem bio. I'll give him a call. And about two weeks later, I get this phone call from Steve. And little did I know, Steve was the two star in charge of the joint chem bio program for the Department of Defense at the time. And so Steve had read my resume and understood what I wanted to do for a career.

And he said, do you want to live in Utah or Maryland? And I said, Maryland. And so two weeks after that, I had four job interviews and three job offers within one chem biodefense lab, and it was a fantastic opportunity that I jumped at.

Tom Shortridge
As an Army civilian, Mike had his foot in the door. He had successfully navigated the internship and secured his position, but the trajectory inspired by his cinematic counterpart was only half complete.

Michael Feasel
I came in through what was called the Army Career Training and Education Development System, the EDS system, and it was an internship program. I did my internship for 12 months, and so long as you didn't burn the house down at some time during that 12 months, they gave you a job. So I got a job, and after one more year, I was a vested government employee, and I had an opportunity, and I talked to my leadership about going back and getting a degree, an advanced degree. And so following my Nic Cage trajectory, I said, well, I have the bachelor's in biochemistry now, I just need the PhD in toxicology.

And I was - my position was housed in the toxicology division of my agency at the time, and it only made sense that I have a toxicology degree then. So I started pursuing that in 2010 and defended my thesis and graduated with my PhD in 2017, after which I was able to be a government performer on a DARPA program.

And after I did this program for about two years, that's when the program manager, who was overseeing my work said, hey, I'm, I'm taking a job elsewhere. My time's up at DARPA this summer. I'm looking for a new, new program manager.

And I said, oh, cool. Let me know. Let me know who it is. I'll be sure to, you know, keep working with them – thinking, I have a permanent government job. It never even crossed my mind that he was actually trying to recruit me for this. So three more phone calls like that happened.  

And finally I said, well, okay, who are you thinking of that? Who's it going to be? Do you know yet? And he goes, I'm thinking it's you, stupid. And I was like, oh, oh, okay, this all makes sense now.

This is great. That was my moment of - that's how people get this job. And that was something that I had wondered to myself so many times. Being a performer on this type of program is, how do you become the program manager? And this whole experience led serendipitously to that, where there was no hesitation. It was as soon as he said, is it something you'd be interested in? Think about it over the weekend or over the next couple weeks and we'll talk again. I said, no, no, no, I am very interested. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity.

And so that sent me further down this path of pursuing the DARPA program manager role, which I started here three and a half years ago, a little more, and has been the experience of a lifetime with more impact in the past four years than I ever could have imagined having over an entire career in this field. And that being said, I spent so long narrowing in my focus on this chem biodefense expertise, trying my hardest to be Stanley Goodspeed. And then I came to DARPA, and I got blown back out because of the breadth of impactful programs that a program manager here manages and oversees. And so I have gone far outside of my comfort zone of chem biodefense and have touched many other technologies and capabilities that really do change the world.

Tom Shortridge
Stepping into the program manager role at DARPA meant being thrown into the deep end. The agency is known for its world changing innovations, but it also operates within the larger structure of the US government. For many, this is a daunting maze of bureaucracy and unfamiliar processes.

Michael Feasel
The skill set that I had prior to DARPA that has, I think benefited me most here at DARPA is, having come from another government agency, there's a lot of language and processes and the bureaucracy of working for a government agency that is common. What is so unique about DARPA is how much faster and how much more agile DARPA is as an agency compared to other places where, you know, it would take me six months to get a computer issued to me. DARPA has everything laid out for you when you show up on day one, and if you need anything along the way, it's just a matter of swapping stuff out. It's little things like that.

The other thing that I'll say, this part of the experience base that I had coming into this was understanding how government funding works, just as at a basic level, understanding the colors of money and what certain acronyms and abbreviations mean, I think helped me adapt to the pace of this job much more rapidly than someone coming in straight from academia or a position where they don't have that that common language.

Tom Shortridge
While his background gave him a head start on the process. It did little to prepare him for the sheer breadth of the science he would now oversee. He had spent over a decade honing his expertise in chemical and biological defense, only to be handed a portfolio of programs that seemed to come from another world entirely.

Michael Feasel
Having spent 15-17 years honing in on the chem bio mission and then coming to DARPA, there was quite a contrast from day one. I had three programs that were focused on drug discovery for two of them, and immunology and vaccinology, the design of vaccines as another.  

The two drug discovery programs that I had were focused on anti-depressants and treatments for PTSD. The other one was focused on pain relief. So very different indication spaces, very different approaches, neither of which overlapped with my chem bio experience whatsoever.  

And then the vaccinology and immunology program was just something completely out of left field to me. In fact, you know, looking back at my coursework at the graduate level and undergraduate level, I swore I would never taking immunology class again or become involved any other way. And here I was, managing this program that far and away, was so incredibly fascinating to me. It really changed my mind about how I thought about immunology and vaccinology.

From this academic mindset of an undergraduate student to someone overseeing the leaders in the field who are blazing new trails in something that impacts everybody across the globe. It was cool to do from the management side, but it was so educational, and it was so rewarding to see what they were doing and doing this in the context of coming out of a pandemic especially.

It helped me realize the importance of what these people were doing, and then that made me lean in even harder to enable them to do what they set out to do, which was really, really hard work.

Tom Shortridge
This immersion in unfamiliar fields sparked a change in Mike's perspective. He was no longer just a specialist executing a mission, but an innovator seeing connections across disparate areas of science.

Michael Feasel
I did pitch my own program right after getting here, aiming to discover and develop new anesthetic drugs so drugs that can be used much more safely in a clinical setting, but also have some utility at or near that point of injury on the battlefield to help reduce trauma on the battlefield. Reduce the burden of injury on the battlefield, as well as improve the casualty outcome.

After pitching that, I was able to inherit several other programs from drug delivery to gene editing technologies for therapeutics, to what I just pitched a few months ago, which was to bring it full circle, a camp and biodefense program focused on de-risking novel medical countermeasures for really toxic materials.

Tom Shortridge
Imagine a future where chemical weapons are rendered ineffective not by bulky protective gear alone, but by prophylactic medicines that neutralize the threat at the molecular level. That's the vision of Mike's Protean program, which is working to fundamentally change the paradigm of medical countermeasures. Instead of attempting to intercept chemical threats before they reach their targets or treating the symptoms of exposure. Protean aims to engineer resilience into the proteins targeted by the chemicals to stop the poisoning at its source.

As his time at DARPA winds down, Mike finds himself in a new role, that of a recruiter and mentor. He looks for that same spark of brilliance and unconventional thinking in the performers he works with. Planting the seed of opportunity just as his former program manager did for him. This has led him to reflect on the core of the DARPA experience and how to articulate its unique value to the next generation of world changing innovators.

Michael Feasel
Right when I hit August of last year is when I started reaching out to people who I thought maybe I could work there. Maybe there's a place for me here. But I will say the most promising leads have come from the places that I didn't expect. I also came into this role thinking, figuring, assuming that I was going to go back to my old agency in a different role, hopefully in some sort of leadership or innovation role, and take some of the skills that I learned at DARPA and apply them to chem biodefense.

And that is a possibility. Sure. But the other opportunities that are presented themselves at academic institutions, pharmaceutical houses, in venture and private equity, for being essentially the sniff test for, ‘should someone invest their money in an up and coming technology, is it worth it? What's the risk profile and what's the impact of this?’ That's what DARPA really makes the program managers think about on a daily basis.

And so that's a skill set that is really immersed here for every program manager. And I think every SETA as well, where we are better judges than most as to how promising a technology or capability is and then how to go make it real and make it happen. Across multiple industries, I would say I have a lot of opportunities, which I only owe to this position, and me sitting in my seat while I've been here.

I don't think these opportunities would have presented themselves had I not said yes to the DARPA ask. That is something I also have started doing recently is just sort of, you know, planting the seed in some of the performers ears that I do work with closely and say, hey, you've mentioned a few ideas that are pretty DARPA-y. Is this a role that you've ever considered for yourself?

It's hard to navigate that because you're talking to leaders in these fields who are Nobel laureates, who are very esteemed professors at prestigious universities, and in many cases, they're giving up a lot to leave those positions to come to a place like DARPA. But not only is it not unheard of, it happens all the time.

Tom Shortridge
It's a long way from the college student who wasn't sure what he wanted to do, who only knew he was drawn to a problem he couldn't get name back then the path to a place like DARPA was invisible to him. Now, as he finds himself in the position of guiding others, he has to make that path visible.

Mike Feasel
So if I were back at my alma mater, which is the University of Texas - I always think this is a little poetic. The University of Texas at Austin’s motto is “what starts here changes the world.” And so the first point that I would make to anybody there and anywhere, really, because it's a motto, is that what we do here at DARPA truly changes the world. We have a whole wall of things that DARPA laid the groundwork for, took the first step in the direction of, that have changed the world in so many fields, in so many different ways.  

The second thing that I would say that this experience gives someone in the program manager seat or at the agency in any role, is a perspective of, you can - you as an individual - can do this. It isn't magic. It isn't anything except a lot of hard work and dedication and follow through and a little bit of luck and you can get a really good idea, a great idea, supported and executed and in the hands of people who want and need that thing in a bigger, faster, better way than you can anywhere else.

You know, people look at DARPA as big sacks of money of the US government or of the Department of Defense. And it's not just that. We aren't just there to resource things. We embrace risk. And with that comes resourcing. Absolutely. But we take on the notion if someone comes to us and says, I have an idea and it's gonna sound crazy, but if it works, the world tomorrow looks different than it does today. You can't do that anywhere else that I know of, at least.

And the third thing that I will say, that is the selling point for DARPA to me is hands down the people. The legacy and the image of DARPA is one thing. And then, you know, seeing behind the curtain, seeing how the sausage is made, meeting the people who actually do this job and have done it and have been back for multiple tours.

It's phenomenal to see not just the caliber of intellect and creativity and innovation that they have, but the thoughtfulness and the kindness and how much they want to help the next person behind them accomplish what they're aiming to do. It's one of the most incredible experiences I've had in my life, and far and away the people are what have made the most difference.

Tom Shortridge
From a college classroom to the vanguard of American innovation. Mike Feasel's journey has been guided by a rare combination of serendipity and focused determination. It began with a fascination for unseen threats, was crystallized by a Hollywood action hero, and realized through a series of unexpected connections. His story shows that a career path doesn't have to be a straight line. It can be a winding road of discovery where embracing the unknown leads not just to personal fulfillment, but to work that truly has the power to change the world.  

That's all for this episode of Voices from DARPA. For more information on anything we discussed in this program, please visit DARPA.mil. We'll have links in the show notes. As always, thanks for listening.