Mike Levin on using bioelectricity to study how cells form (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Mike Levin on using bioelectricity to study how cells form (2019)

wyss.harvard.edu

116 pointswalterbell21 comments

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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-9rLlFgcm0

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.

> "new communication control channel in biology"

Not necessarily new, "The Body Electric" which Levin himself cites as his inspiration, has been around for almost 50 years [1]. It's sad that something so revolutionary can be sidelined for half a century, but it's exhilarating to see the rapid progress that really smart people can make when they consider some fringe ideas.

[1]https://www.amazon.com/Body-Electric-Electromagnetism-Founda...

It’s important to note that while he credits the book with inspiring him to investigate bioelectricity, he states repeatedly in his talks that it is not the same method of action outlined in the book that actually works to reprogram cells.

> The mainstream of higher-ed biology is not yet fully on board and is still snickering at his work because he is an outsider

I don't think people are snickering at him. He was invited to Caltech to speak this past winter. I think that system is just poorly characterized so not a lot of people work with it yet, and he is certainly a pioneer in the area.

Sounds pretty amazing. I wonder if it can be used to enhance parts of the brain (imagine a larger or more dense PFC, which so many dearly need) and muscle (always in top shape). That would be fantastic, along with super regeneration.

He also wrote [1], which is a review of the development in that domain in the last 10 years or so. It's amazing how much progress has been made even when compared to OP links which is only 2 years old. This is by far the best thing I have read in the last 12 months. From controlling morphogenesis, re-viewing what life and death really mean, where memory actually live, how to create synthetic lifeforms etc. I would recommend it to anyone. It's strangely relevant to computer science/AI as well in my opinion.

The ethical implications are also quite staggering to think about.

You can also find a keynote from him from the last ALife conference, around the same theme, but less thorough [2].

[1] "Life, death, and self: Fundamental questions of primitive cognition viewed through the lens of body plasticity and synthetic organisms" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00062... (You can find it in full on Sci-hub).

[2] "Multi-scale goal-directedness in biology as inspiration for robotics and artificial life" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L43-XE1uwWc

This is so exciting that I almost wanted to sign up for biology/bioinformatics degree after seeing this. I think they will get Nobel prize.

This talk of his blew my mind: "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System - NeurIPS 2018"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg

Just piling on: also absolutely loved this talk, even as someone not in the industry.

Past related threads:

What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 - Dec 2018 (16 comments)

On Having No Head: Cognition Throughout Biological Systems (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18700328 - Dec 2018 (10 comments)

Memory in the Flesh: Can memories survive outside the brain? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9226391 - March 2015 (12 comments)

Many comments referencing his 2018 talk:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

2020 TED talk with demo footage, https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_levin_the_electrical_bluep...

> DNA isn't the only builder in the biological world -- there's also a mysterious bioelectric layer directing cells to work together to grow organs, systems and bodies, says biologist Michael Levin. Sharing unforgettable and groundbreaking footage of two-headed worms, he introduces us to xenobots -- the world's first living robots, created in his lab by cracking the electrical code of cells -- and discusses what this discovery may mean for the future of medicine, the environment and even life itself.

Levin's work was partly funded by the late Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, https://allencenter.tufts.edu/

Their progress is astonishing. I've been following it for a few years and their research is barely starting to reach the mainstream media. He will get a Nobel for sure.

These are wild discoveries, maybe one day regrowing a lost arm we be more than science fiction!

Let's start with teeth please :)

Instantly reminded me of "Body Electric" by Robert Becker. A fascinating account of how novelty in research is often ridiculed despite being revolutionary, interspersed with various electromagnetic theories: from limb regeneration with cancer growth to life's origins, epigenesis, and embryology.

Edit: gah, should've read the article before commenting, he actually mentions the book as one of his inspirations.

Levin’s papers are wonderful.

I got sucked into morphogenesis last year and wrote an entire simulator.

I was able to simulate a flatworm splitting its head: the greatest day of my year. (Granted, it was a very boring locked-down year...)

The very simplistic implementation behind the simulator is here: http://cycell2d.com/field.html

Anyway, Levin is very inspiring and interesting.

He did this podcast a while back that was really good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm7VDk8kxOw

If interested in this topic, you may want to check out the book "The Body Electric" by Robert Becker.

Too funny, I literally turned the last page of that book last night. It is essentially a meta study on past research regarding the influence of electric potentials and currents on regeneration and healing along with the potential dangers of non-ionizing EMF radiation. I felt like I was reading a book from the future despite most of the research being from the 1950-70's.

He mentions that they use some types of drugs that close/open ion channels to cause the growth patterns to change. I just googled and found that the human inner ear alone has 300 types of ion channels. Is this technique just a matter of finding the combination of open/closed channels to get the desired effect? If so, the inner ear has a possible 2^300 combinations of open/closed doesn't it? This seems extremely difficult to do on anything that complicated. Or am I reading this wrong?

A Frankenstein image used in the article: https://wyss-prod.imgix.net/app/uploads/2019/07/25150410/She...

This is fantastic work. I had picked up The Body Electric over a decade ago, and maintain a strong interest in these ideas, though I currently work in a different field (synthetic biology). I hope to contribute in the future.

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