Thomas Ouldridge
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2021–2023
1:18:06 · 32K views · Mar 28, 2021
Michael Levin presents his lab's work on how cellular collectives use bioelectric networks to make anatomical decisions. Topics include pattern memories, regeneration and synthetic living organisms.
HN commenters push it as an example of Levin's talks, which they think deserve far more attention.
5 comments from Hacker News
Moar people need to be talking about this guys work, a buddy clued me in to it last year. Creating new species without any genetic changes... it's huge. Not only has he discovered a new communication control channel in biology, machine learning is unlocking the commands to intelligently manipulate that channel at will. It's many times deeper this too, this is incredible work. Want those tree-grown steaks rather than a stew of muscle cells with no structure? This work is how you grow an intact cow muscle without the rest of the cow with ease. Want to tell those cancer cells using your body as a petrie dish to knock it off and to start working with the rest of your body again? This is a direct path towards that too. Comparing his 2020 ALife talk to another one published in 2021 he's still making progress: this video The mainstream of higher-ed biology is not yet fully on board and is still snickering at his work because he is an outsider, but his results are impressive enough that doubters will become irrelevant soon enough.
I'm not nearly educated enough about this subject to try to summarise it, but the research being carried out by Michael Levin's group into how organisms control anatomy growth is completely fascinating and has the feel of a breakthrough. Almost all the talks I've seen are good, for example: this video Creating new species without genetic changes seems wild!
In re: Michael Levin, do see his talks "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" [LINK] and "Anatomical decision-making by cellular collectives" this video
Oh, but the "organic" solutions do highly deterministic, extremely programmable computational work: 99.99999+% of newborns have 2 hands, 2 legs, and 1 head, and they all started development from a single cell [1]. It's just that the "organic" solutions are written in a 4+ billion year-old highly redundant, distributed, resilient, evolved language whereas our CPUs are not on the same phylogenetic tree. The quotation marks around organic are just there to point out that there is something wrong with the dichotomy organic (various pro/eu-karyotes from bacteria to humans)/inorganic (from thermostats to CPUs). [1] Michael Levin: Anatomical decision-making by cellular collectives this video
I don't know about this particular species, but some planaria can be split into more than one piece and regenerate. A record is over 60 from what I recall from this video: this video