The Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) got its start as a response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957. It developed ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet and, this decade, has been heavily involved in the attempted development of the elusive and possibly mythical "isomer bomb" that would be the most power non-nuclear explosive ever built – that is, if it could be built.

DARPA has its hands full with many other research projects as well, often doling out taxpayer dollars to researchers investigating all manner of strange and sometimes macabre – even if potentially useful – technologies and techniques. Consider, for instance, the use of a poison, hydrogen sulfide, to induce suspended animation in mammals. According to DARPA, the technique may someday be used to save the lives of people who, through catastrophic injury, have lost up to 60 percent of their blood. That's usually a death sentence, especially on the battlefield, but DARPA believes that the new suspended animation technique might buy enough time to get the victims of such injuries to treatment in time to save lives.

In an interview with Noah Shachtman in Wired magazine's "Danger Room" Blog, DARPA chief Tony Tether discusses this and several other DARPA projects. The interview is a rare opportunity to examine some of DARPA's current projects as explained by the agency's highest official, and he makes a case that DARPA's work is not only useful but desperately necessary. But is it really?

Despite advances made as a result of DARPA involvement since the agency's inception, the private sector still may be a more powerful source of innovation. DARPA, for one thing, spends a tremendous amount of money on questionable pursuits. According to the Washington Post, for instance, by 2004 the agency had spent $7 million on research related to isomer bombs utilizing nuclear isomers of hafnium. While promising to release prodigious quantities of energy – one gram of the material has 50,000 times the explosive power of a gram of TNT – there has been little progress in harnessing this potential, and many scientists find the project laughable.

On the other hand, the private sector seems to have harnessed the properties of plain old hafnium in a way that will benefit millions of consumers. In January, both Intel and IBM announced that they had found ways to replace some silicon elements in computer chips with hafnium, thereby fixing an electricity leakage problem in microchips that might have hindered the introduction of faster, more powerful computers. The Seattle Times noted that the technology will allow the shrinkage of "existing chip designs to smaller dimensions, meaning they will run faster and use less power."

So, while DARPA might have the James Bond gee-whiz factor in its favor, in the end it is again private enterprise that does the better job of developing technology.