Team builds first living robots–that can reproduce
wyss.harvard.edu
wyss.harvard.edu
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27332700
For xenobots to be useful, the underlying cell behaviour needs to be better understood and controlled. Their research appears interesting if you are a computer scientist or physicist. But for practical applications and applied biotechnology what they are doing is an curious gimmick at best. If they can perfect their understanding, then they would have basically solved half the puzzle of organ engineering. But right now it is no different from black box engineering.
This is very similar to Turing's reaction-diffusion models on leopard spots — great for computer modeling and popular science magazines, not so immediately useful if your grandmother gets cancer.
I will admit it looks perfect to sell as a biotech startup to dumb SV VCs who don't do their due diligence when it comes to investing in applied science fields.
> "It’s very non-intuitive. It looks very simple, but it’s not something a human engineer would come up with."
and
> These millimeter-sized living machines, entirely contained in a laboratory, easily extinguished, and vetted by federal, state and institutional ethics experts, “are not what keep me awake at night. (...)” says UVM’s Bongard. “This is an ideal system in which to study self-replicating systems. We have a moral imperative to understand the conditions under which we can control it, direct it, douse it, exaggerate it.”
From https://www.pnas.org/content/117/4/1853?ijkey=c53500b4c64445..., they designed (via a genetic algorithm, for some reason) the cheese puffs.
Then created the real cheese puffs from real frog stem cells:
> Pluripotent stem cells are first harvested from blastula stage Xenopus laevis embryos, dissociated, and pooled to achieve the desired number of cells. Following an incubation period, the aggregated tissue is then manually shaped by subtraction using a combination of microsurgery forceps and a 13-μm wire tip cautery electrode, producing a biological approximation of the simulated design.
From https://www.pnas.org/content/118/49/e2112672118, they put these hand-made cheese puffs into a sea of more frog stem cells (that naturally already form epidermis spheroids) which through their random movement clump the stem cells, helping them make little epidermis balls?
I don't think this is replication. I think the little cheese balls just randomly (or maybe because they gave them cilia?) move about and clump stem cells together that naturally become epidermis balls and end up looking similar to what they designed.
> [...] that, a few days later, become new Xenobots that look and move just like themselves.
The clumped up balls that are pushed together develop into more of the originals that function identically, not just look similar. Thus the children can create grandchildren and so on.
1) The researchers compressed a group of stem cells into a xenobot
2) The xenobot is introduced into an environment with many loose stem cells
3) The xenobot, which moves of its own accord, moves around this environment and as it does so, collects and compresses loose stem cells into the shape of another xenobot
4) The newly compressed stem cells are now a new xenobot, which starts moving of its own accord and creating its own child xenobot. Goto 3.
The images also makes them look a little grey and gooey, so the public will probably latch onto something like "grey goo" as a nickname. What could go wrong?