Michael Levin and the shifting landscape of biological form and function

Mike Levin's work on the biology of form and function is groundbreaking – and the underlying ideas and implications are transforming our ideas of what it means to be human

I’ll be talking with groundbreaking biologist Michael Levin on April 17th as part of our Future of Being Human … Unplugged series of online conversations — you can sign up for the live stream here. Before we chat though, I wanted to take a quick foray into some of Mike’s work and why it’s is so revolutionary.

Imagine if it was possible to take a cluster of cells from one part of your body and use them to create “biological machines” that are capable of actively finding and repairing damaged tissue in other parts — including the brain.

It sounds like science fiction, but it’s fast becoming reality thanks to the work of biologist Michael Levin and his team.

Mike’s work is turning our understanding of biology — and the biology of form and function in particular — on its head. For some years now he’s been driven by questions around how our cells assemble and create very specific physical forms and morphologies, all the way up to organs, limbs and even whole bodies.

Surprisingly, the answer isn’t as straight forward as it might seem. How do the cells in a ridge on your fingertip, or the curve of tip of your nose, know where they’re supposed to go — especially as these structures are much larger than their component biological building blocks? What tells the cells on the tip of your tongue what a tongue looks like — and what it does not? What determines the final contours of your body? And what governs whether, if those contours are disrupted — say, by the loss of a limb — they are regenerated or not?

Despite the conventional answer of “it’s all in our genes,” it turns out that this is not the case. Rather, the behaviors of collectives of cells are governed by electrical signaling between them — endogenous bioelectrical networks in Mike’s words — that map out at a macroscopic scale how they behave and function together.

It’s these networks that guide the formation of increasing complex structures in growing embryos; that map out where your eyes, nose and limbs should be; that determine how your organs are distributed within you; and that govern what the ultimate physical space your body occupies looks like.

The revelation is something of a paradigm shift for anyone who simply assumes our genome alone is responsible for what we look like. But this is just the beginning. If it’s possible to map out these endogenous bioelectrical networks, it should be possible to redraw them them. And if we can redraw them, we have the means of persuading cells to build different structures, and to behave in different ways.

With this simple premise it becomes possible to imagine plausible technologies that allow damaged tissue to be repaired, severed limbs to be regrown, and compromised organs — including the brain — to be brought back to a healthy state.

This encompasses a lot of the work in regenerative medicine that Mike and his team are working on. But there’s a much larger story here of how emerging science is transforming how we think about biology, and about ourselves — and how this extends to the nature of intelligence and even the emergence of artificial intelligence.

I’ll be talking with Mike about the the broader implications of his work on April 17th (further details here). But to whet your appetite, I wanted to get back to those “biological machines” I started with, and the idea that what cells do and how they behave — even human cells — can be modified by modulating the bioelectrical networks that tie them together.

In a recent study, Mike’s team took human epithelial cells and encouraged them to develop into what look remarkably like simple organisms — what Mike calls “anthrobots”. Despite having their origin in cells that line the respiratory tract, they behave as anything but these — as this video below from the Foresight Institute shows:

These anthrobots are able to interact with and navigate through their environment — very much as if they are autonomous biological entities. That in itself is astounding. But things get even more interesting when they’re introduced to a new biological environment.

The video above shows anthrobots created from lung epithelial cells introduced to neural tissue with a scratch running through it. Remarkably, not only do they navigate through the scratch, but they begin to cluster and knit the neural tissue together.

Just pause a minute to think about that: cells from lung tissue were persuaded to behave like autonomous organisms that have the potential ability to heal damage in brain tissue.

In effect, these anthrobots have the ability to problem solve with agency in a new environment — a property some (Mike included) would describe as a form of intelligence.

This and other ongoing work is showing just how little we know about what cells are capable of as they are guided by bioelectrical networks that can be designed and engineered. More than this though, this work begins to challenge our very notions of agency, intelligence, and what it means to be human. It’s even beginning to call into question conventional ideas of memory.

These are all areas we’ll be exploring when I talk with Mike on April 17th. And while his research is challenging conventional understandings of biology, I suspect that it’s the philosophical implications behind it that will be the true game changer.

Hope you can join us!

PS — I barely scratch the surface of Mike’s work and thinking here — for more I’d encourage you to check out his writing on the website Forms of life, forms of mind.