The Biologist who is blowing our minds
Michael Levin is a developmental biologist from Tufts University. He has the ability to take an organism that doesn’t seem capable and show it can do amazing things. His team and he once isolated skin cells from an embryonic frog and cultivated them independently. He said that because there were no other cell types, the skin cells could not be \”bullied\” into producing tissue. They reassembled to form a new type of organism, a \”xenobot\”, a term derived from the Latin name for the frog species Xenopus. It moved like a paramecium through pond water. It would sometimes gather loose skin cells, pile them up and form their own xenobots – a kind of self-replication. Levin saw it as a demonstration of the latent capabilities that all living organisms possess. They may have evolved to do one particular thing but could do something else if the circumstances are right.
Slime mold can grow differently depending on what music is playing.
Recently, I met Levin in Kathmandu at a workshop about science, technology and Buddhism. Even though he hates to fly, he said that this event was well worth the effort. His scientific talk would have been captivating even without the Himalayan backdrop. Each slide presented a new, bizarre experiment. Butterflies can remember their past as caterpillars even after their brains have turned into mush. If you cut off the tail and head of a flatworm or planarian, it will grow two new heads. Amputating again will cause the worm to regrow both its heads. Levin claims that the worm records the new shape as an electrical pattern in its body. He believes that electrical signaling occurs throughout nature and is not restricted to neurons. Levin and his colleagues discovered that certain diseases could be cured through retraining gene and protein networks, just as you would train a neural net.
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