[Dryerase] MIT Super Soldier

[Shawn G]

Asheville Global Report
www.agrnews.org
reprinting permitted for non-profit use, and for members of the Dry-erase 
news wire.

MIT's super soldier design swiped from small press comic book

By Nicholas Holt

Sept. 10. (AGR)—  When the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 
proudly announced its $50 million contract with the US Army to design new 
technologies for the super-soldier of the future, analogies with science 
fiction stories and comic book heroes were apparently irresistible. 
References to the sci-fi film Starship Troopers and soldiers able to “leap 
buildings in a single bound” and the proud pronouncement that “The picture 
is very futuristic,” appeared  in MIT’s Technology Review Magazine in the 
spring of 2002 in an article announcing the creation of what would be called 
the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (AGR 170).
The parallels are closer to science fiction than it first seemed.
Accompanying the article was an illustration of the proposed super-soldier, 
who stood in a futuristic cityscape in her robotic green armor, pointing a 
powerful looking weapon at the viewer.
As it turns out, the image was stolen from a small press comic book called 
Radix, in which the heroine wears a suite of armor identical to that of 
MIT’s “soldier of the future.”
MIT “had a press release using that artwork and giving it out to all the 
newspapers,” says Ray Lai, who, along with his  brother Ben, created Radix. 
“We had fans from California calling us up, saying they found the newspapers 
[and] it’s an exact copy of what we did.”
MIT’s first announced the creation of the IST, and used the illustration in 
March. The image continued to appear on MIT’s website as recently as Aug. 
28, according to a report by USAToday.
On Aug. 30, MIT Professor Edwin L. Thomas, IST’s director, issued a press 
release, stating “MIT strongly supports the rights of creators and greatly 
regrets using the image without permission or credit.” According to Thomas, 
the confusion started when he requested his daughter provide the 
illustration of a super-soldier but he was not made aware that the image was 
appropriated from Radix.
“What people need to understand is that I sent a letter complaining about 
this back in April. For them to come out now is more for them to please the 
public rather than to please us,” says Lai, who complains that MIT never 
issued a retraction to the newspapers it distributed the image to.
“They used [our] image and they put someone else’s name on it and they put 
it all over the newspapers,” he says, contrasting the small circulation of 
Horizon Comics, the independent press that publishes Radix, with the massive 
circulation of USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the other major 
newspapers that carried the MIT picture.
“The main goal for us is to [make clear] the fact the image is not theirs. I 
don’t want any confusion. It appeared in all the newspapers. I don’t want 
anyone calling us a cheater two or three years down the line because they’ve 
seen what MIT did and then say were copying them.”



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