October 27, 2023
You and I are emergent, coherent, goal-seeking entities supervening on a large collection of cells in our brain. In this talk, I will describe developmental bioelectricity - the physical and computational mechanism that binds independent, competent subunits (cells) into coherent wholes that exert intelligence in novel problem spaces. It turns out that this biophysical mechanism - really, a cognitive glue - was exploited by evolution long before brains and muscles came on the scene. We have developed the first molecular tools to read and write the proto-cognitive information that is processed by the bioelectric networks of all cells in the body. I will describe how we model and modulate the pattern memories that underlie the collective intelligence of cell groups during embryogenesis, regeneration, and cancer suppression. I will finish by showing a synthetic life form (Xenobots) and other examples of the plasticity (problem-solving capacity) of life and discussing the broader implications for regenerative medicine, synthetic bioengineering, and ethics in a future of diverse intelligence.
Michael Levin is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University, and associate faculty at Harvard’s Wyss Institute. He serves as the director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts and the co-director of the Institute for Computationally Designed Organisms at Tufts/ÐÓ°ÉÊÓƵ. He has published over 400 peer-reviewed publications across developmental biology, computer science, and philosophy of mind. Dr. Levin received dual B.S. degrees in computer science and biology, followed by a Ph.D. from Harvard with Clifford Tabin. His graduate work on the molecular basis of left-right asymmetry (Cell 1995) was chosen by the journal Nature as a “Milestone in Developmental Biology in the last century”. He did post-doctoral training at Harvard School of Medicine in cell biology, and started his independent lab in 2000, developing the first molecular tools to read and write bioelectric prepatterns in non-neural tissue. His group at Tufts works to understand information processing and problem-solving across scales, in a range of naturally evolved, synthetically engineered, and hybrid living systems. The Levin lab has pioneered approaches to organ regeneration, cancer reprogramming, non-genetic modification of the bodyplan, and the engineering of novel living proto-organisms. Using tools from behavioral and computer science, Dr. Levin seeks to understand the collective intelligence of cells and harness their problem-solving capacities for applications in birth defects, regeneration, cancer, and synthetic bioengineering.