The Frontier Research at Michael Levin’s Biology Lab |
Photo by Ousa Chea
The laboratory of developmental biologist Michael Levin at Tufts University, with its dozen or so postgrads, is a hub of ideas, experiments, and discoveries. Most exciting is the focus on cognition as a process involving the entire human organism—not just the brain—and what this implies for new ways to cure cancer and other diseases.
The “ethical imperative” to find the cause of—and relieve—pain and disease is a guiding concept for the lab’s biomedical work. Underpinning all Levin’s work is the remarkable idea that some form of cognition (thinking) is the “glue” that allows cells to communicate bioelectrically. This concept expands the study of cognition from a brain-only approach to one that extends to every cell in the body. Expanding the notion of consciousness to all living cells helps researchers at the lab to discover new things about humans and about whatever else exists or can be created.
Using AI (artificial intelligence) in the quest for new therapies, the lab has released frog skin cells from their two-dimensional confinement into a three-dimensional water container to study their behavior. The new entities, called Xenobots, are tiny robots used to help understand the general laws that govern both human and synthetic behavior. Once freed from being two-dimensional skin cells, the Xenobots exhibit new types of behavior. For example, they can swim in different directions and figure out how to get through a maze.
Professor Levin directs both the Allen Discovery Center and the Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology at Tufts University in Massachusetts. His lab is unusual for the field of biology, a fact that Levin, writing on the lab’s website, attributes to his training as a computer engineer and his “deep interest in the philosophy of mind.”
The concept of intelligence as being ubiquitous has proved to be a fruitful research approach, but it is far from mainstream biology. I interviewed Levin for Human Bridges and asked what the response of other scientists was to this idea. He replied that “there is a community of scientists who work on this (the diverse intelligence community). But there is resistance from the mainstream, reductionist/mechanist camp, who expect everything to be handled at the molecular level, with no need for cognitive tools.”
His response to the reductionists helps to understand what is special about the Levin lab’s work. “To them I say that we are currently in biology where computer science was in the 1950s—programming by rewiring the hardware. A good start, but the reason we have these amazing information technologies is that we understood the magic of reprogramming and software: We don’t operate our laptop with a soldering iron anymore, and we don’t communicate with humans and animals by reaching in and tweaking their synaptic proteins. We use communication interfaces to reprogrammable or (in the case of life) agential materials.”
In addition to reductionists, Levin said: “There is another community that resists my message—the organicists who believe that life is a binary, special category which has magic that cannot be replicated in ‘mere machines,’ and that it’s a category error to place living intelligence on the same spectrum with that of materials. To them, I point out that even minimal matter and simple algorithms (as we’ve discovered) do things beyond what their algorithms dictate.”
He continued: “For the same reason that the laws of biochemistry don’t tell the whole story of the human mind, the laws of physics and algorithms don’t tell the whole story even of ‘machine.’ Cognition is baked into the universe, arising from the properties of mathematical objects that guide the behavior of even simple molecular networks. It is fundamental, and our formal models of machines, computers, etc., don’t capture it fully in living, engineered, or hybrid media.”
“That’s perhaps the hardest idea for people to assimilate,” Levin said in his interview, “because they expect the world to be neatly divided into magical categories of ‘dumb matter’ and ‘majestic life.’ It is one spectrum, and we are now starting to understand how things scale along that spectrum. Like back when we had no theory of electromagnetism and thought that light, magnets,........