9 Movie Mad Scientists That Might Have Been Onto Something

Captain America is supposed to be the ultimate soldier, an ordinary human elevated to the peak of human perfection. Stronger, faster, smarter, and a total dish to boot - but could this soon become a reality?

The US defence company DARPA has been particularly interested in creating a breed of super-soldiers. Despite the fact the wars are increasingly being fought by robots, the nature of modern warfare still requires boots on the ground. The people those boots belong to, however, can no longer be the under-trained cannon fodder of the wars of old, each soldier has to be an elite killing machine, capable of winning a war with brains as well as brawn.

One project, which ran up a nice little bill of $44.5 million, had the aim of developing "biological systems that cross multiple scales of biological architecture and function, from the molecular and genetic level". Sounds a lot like a super-soldier, doesn't it?

 There is also another project in the works that is looking into the potential of neural implants that will control the brains of soldier. So now we have super-zombie-soldiers on the way, which is nice and terrifying.

Oh, and if you weren't entirely convinced that the US military boffins are raiding their kids' comic book collections for ideas, they called their most recent strength and performance enhancing exoskeleton HULC (Human Universal Load Carrier). 

Subtle, guys, real subtle.