How bioelectricity could regrow limbs and organs | Hacker News Reader

How bioelectricity could regrow limbs and organs

news.uchicago.edu

217 pointsKenRuf100 comments

There's a fascinating (in my opinion) TED talk about this featuring the same Biologist, with examples of regenerative experiments performed using Flatworms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XheAMrS8Q1c

This is Michael Levin, same guy from the article.

> featuring the same Biologist

A more in-depth and broader version of that talk by Michael is here: https://youtu.be/jLiHLDrOTW8?si=unfPK_k1TUHmRI7m

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-023-01780-3

This technology doesn't seem to be limited to existing limbs and organs. After replacing a missing arm you could add a third arm. A man could grow a uterus since he has the X chromosomes and with a transplant that includes Y chromosomes, a woman could grow testes. Parthenogenesis could become a choice. Another head seems possible. The limits are more likely to come from regulation than a reluctance of people to transform themselves.

I imagine for an extra arm you'd need to also figure out how to grow the right neurons to control it.

Plus extensive musculature at the new shoulder joint and reinforced bones for the new muscle attachments. I won't be first in line.

I get the sense that if it's connected, your brain will figure out how to make it work.

The curious thing about Michael Levin's work is that they figured out "top level abstractions" in bioelectricity that tell the body to figure out everything, including the proper wiring. The have grown eyes in the wrong places that figure out how to connect to the brain, and even two heads.

These guys are decoding the actual bioelectrical code that governs morphogenesis, in a way that you don't need to micromanage anything, you just say "grow an eye" and the cells figure out the rest.

It doesn't work like that at all. Your brain's already plastic enough to be able to (quickly) accept new sensory input if you were given a new sense via prosthetic. Being able to twiddle your third thumb after it grows would be automatic.

"Accepting the limitations of birthform betrays a lack of imagination."

- Civilization: Beyond Earth

If only they would make a sequel! I don't understand why that game was poorly received.

I think it was partly that you have to be quite well-read in sci-fi to know where the names for the tech, buildings, victory conditions etc. come from, so most people don't get an easy anchor to remember what benefits they're likely to get from their choices.

Probably also didn't help that the first version had a very anti-climactic victory sequence; they improved it, but I do remember it being jarringly sudden the first time I played.

I'm a massive Science Fiction buff and bought the game, played it for a few hours and decided it was not for me. I think it's because I couldn't relate to the factions, if that makes sense.

I don't quite remember the factions, but I do remember that like most Civilization games, it was significantly better with the expansions

highly dumbed down compared to the base game

So, in other words, if this technology pans out, this could be possible https://mortalkombat.fandom.com/wiki/Goro

This implies that your brain could handle 4 arms. Chances are they would just be dead limbs.

Obviously we can grow an extra brain that will operate the extra limbs.

Conjoined twins Abby and Brittany Hensel look fairly normal apart from the two heads, but are really one-armed amputees each (but they were born with four arms and two heads): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJN2sauvEb0

Not really. You would need some training but as long as the limbs nerves are connected you can manipulate them.

I think that's wildly over-optimistic: We have plenty of problems with existing limbs when it comes to fixing nerve-damage and then re-training everything. That's also with the advantage of decades of active prior use and in places/amounts that are supported by ten millions years of evolved physiological prep.

Babies do it.

Male monkeys of some species are born colorblind. Researchers used viral gene therapy to add the other rhodopsin shapes for the other colors and they learned to process the new info in less than two weeks. Brains are amazingly plastic, but they are finite, something else would maybe have to go.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. We have mirrored nerve bundles dedicated to limbs with specific junctioning in the CNS. I don’t think it’s just brain plasticity at play, it’s fundamental wiring structure from limb to brain as well.

The problem isn't (just) the brain power, the shoulder joint is also a necessary component of the full range of motion and degrees of freedom your arm has. You can't just slot a ball and socket somewhere into the side of your ribs (and all the supporting musculature) and have it work the same way.

So I wonder how much brain power (if any significant) is being taken up by the uterus during pregnancy.

Well, I don’t know if it’s the brain power or the gray matter pruning that goes on, but my wife was an absolute space cadet for a while during pregnancy and quite a while after. She’d forget almost everything.

I've read literature that the hormone fluctuations resulting from pregnancy, and from parenting regardless of sex actually trigger the destruction of particular parts of the brain in humans.

This is a long shot, but I've always wondered if it might be genetically related to the part of the brain responsible for "abandon one of the babies to escape predator" type reasoning that you see in animals with litters. Something that would have been selected out of human evolution fairly quickly.

I once spend a ( drunken ) evening discussing with a neurosurgeon about the possibility to add a prosthetic tail to the human body.

The base structures to control a tail are present in our brain, sure we lost it a few million years ago but still a tail is much more realistic than e.g a second pair of arms.

no more need for poles when tightrope walking!

Almost certainly wouldn't be an issue. There's a huge amount of plasticity in embodiment. Think about how easily we can control videogame avatars of many physical forms, or adapt ourselves to a musical instrument, or even learn 'pilot' an artificial limb.

Plus all your shirts would need to be tailored.

Biological systems have an incredible plasticity. That same Michael Levin once used his discoveries to make a tadpole with an eye somewhere near the gut. The eye formed correctly and grew a nerve that connected to the spinal cord. The tadpole was able to see out of that eye. It's definitely a non-stock configuration yet it worked. I'm sure it's much more complicated than having 4 arms.

The just in time for Halloween scenario is they grow back but with Alien Hand Syndrome.

So they're constantly giving you wedgies, making rude gestures to loved ones, writing bad checks, and trying to choke you out.

Our brains can learn to handle new limbs - experiments with sensors that detect nerve impulses and control robotic arms have proven that.

Our brains can learn to handle new senses - experiments with sonar or infrared being sent to panels of pins that push on someone's arm have proven that.

Now there's a future society you don't see written about: a standard part of a marriage is the partners exchange immune-compatibilized gonads with their genetic material, so if one partner dies the other still retains the ability to grow viable off-spring from the pairing.

"Ma'am, I'm here to enforce the terms of the divorce agreement. I need you to take his gonads out of your purse and hand them over."

I mean I imagined it would be like, having them surgically implanted somewhere near the kidney's (large blood supply organ).

Which would make this scenario far more cyberpunk.

Nuts!

Now I'm thinking about that song about the man with a detachable penis who looses it.

https://youtu.be/byDiILrNbM4?si=oiR7pKrCkjXOnUqJ

Isn't this already possible by freezing eggs or sperms?

> After replacing a missing arm you could add a third arm.

But it would cost you an arm and a leg. At least initially.

Plus a costs of custom tailoring.

One sex could decide it no longer wants to deal with anyone not of their sex and wipe them out. Humanity could go on with the artificially created sex organs. Lots of possibilities, not all of them the fun, wild and crazy anything goes utopia some are looking for.

Start with something simple and wonderful like growing a new set of teeth.

Indeed. I've been hearing about teeth being grown in vitro or regrown in vivo in various different trials for about 23 years now. Most recent is still saying "perhaps in ten years…"

Let's hope they don't come through the way the current set does.

Something simple like elongated heads

Pair that with a caries vaccine and now we're talking.

Getting a new pair of chompers in middle age would be super great, especially if they won't decay the same way.

That is in progress: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/09/24/japan/science-h...

To be honest I would prefer something non-trivil like fixing broken spinal-column disks ;-)

This technology can also be used to turn cancerous cells into healthy cell Michael Levin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g798Mck7dPk

In a similar topic, peter reddien's lab also made some very interesting videos about regeneration:

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=peter+reddien+lab&iax=video...

For people interesting into structural/mathematical underpinnings of living tissue, his videos demonstrated some strange iterated/algorithmic patterns.

For instance, re-grafting an eye slightly shifted, will mess with the regeneration system, and will lead to a ladder of smaller and smaller eyes appearing. As if being out of balance geometrically caused a rippling effect (like a terminal resizing)

I absolutely loved hearing him talk about his work on Sean Carrol's Mindscape Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm7VDk8kxOw

I think the last time I had paid attention to cellular biology was high school and this really blew me away.

Didn't Robert O Becker also explored this space?

Yeah, AFAIK Becker's "The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life" is pretty much all there was until Michael Levin came along and picked up the torch.

IMO it's one of those weird "holes": why so little interest in human tissue regeneration?

> why so little interest in human tissue regeneration?

There's this HN comment I've always found interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32744294

That is interesting, cheers!

Because there’s no immediate and clear plan for a return on the investment due to how speculative things are, private funding is scant. Because we (the USA) are spending most of our money on the insane military complex there is little extra public funding for actually beneficial R&D.

Edit: grammar.

The US budget is 6.5T USD for 2022.

The US DOD budget was 753B USD for the same year.

The US Medicare program was 747B USD; with another 45B USD for NIH.

So the US actually spends about equal amounts on military and healthcare, at the federal level — about 11.5% on each.

A better question might be why the US gets so little ROI on its healthcare spending.

A much better comparison would be to look at the proportions dedicated to research.

E.g., DARPA vs NIH, not DoD vs Medicare or DoD vs NIH.

DARPA’s budget was slightly under $4B in 2022 — an order of magnitude smaller than the NIH.

My original comparison was because Medicare and the DOD have their own funding authorities and I didn’t want to sift through their budgets to find it all.

The number you’re using is deceptive. You’re citing the Dept. of Defense’s (mandatory) budget, as if that is all the funding that goes to the military. It is not. After mandatory spending (DoD mandatory funds that you cite, social security, medicare, Medicare, interest…) about 25% of the budget is left for discretionary spending… BUT, nearly half of discretionary spending is government wages that, surprise surprise, includes military salaries and benefits. Then, a huge portion of the remaining discretionary funds are again allotted to the various military branches and war spending. Discretionary spending more than doubles the actual amount we put towards the military.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-is-discretionary-spe...

The DOD’s comptroller says you’re wrong — that figure includes both mandatory and discretionary funding authority.

See page 9 and page 14.

https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudg...

>Because we (the USA) are spending most of our money on the insane military complex there is little extra public funding for actually beneficial R&D

This simply isn't true at all. The US doesn't spend that much money on the military compared to other countries. Go look at federal expenditures; most are for entitlements: social security, medicare, etc.

As a percentage of GDP, US expenditure on the military is nothing unusual, and even a little low compared to many countries like Israel, Russia, probably Saudi Arabia, etc. It only seems huge because the US is huge, and has an enormous GDP, so of course it can afford to spend a lot more than a country like Italy for instance.

As the sibling comment said, look at how much the US spends for healthcare (not just federal expenditures, but total spent in the economy), and then ask why the US gets so little for its money there.

The problem in the US isn't spending money, it's how the money is spent and where it goes. Most of it seems to go into a black hole. Just look at how expensive it is to build anything.

The military budget both in absolute and relative terms is ludicrous.

The nations with a more irresponsible budget than the US are mostly state-terror organisations. Which doesn’t mean that the US isn’t one

So you think countries like South Korea, Greece, Kuwait, Columbia, and Singapore are "state-terror organizations"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest...

Inconceivable!

Is this related to any new research? I’ve been interested in this stuff for a while, but this just looks like a rehashing of previous work.

Have you seen Michael Levin's talks about this subject before? It's his team's original research.

This year levin's lab has been on heavy presence online.. don't know much more.

--My question as well. Am I missing a published date on this podcast? It’s my first time seeing their content. This isn’t their latest episode and I am wondering how recent it is.--

Edit: it’s from April 27, 2023. I did miss it. Says it on the linked page

You know, at first I thought this was a load of wank but thinking about it, it does make sense that electricity is used for signalling everything. How does the brain wire itself up? How do cells figure out what to attach to? There must be some sort of mechanism for them to locally communicate.

So if you could give them the signal to reproduce and then signal them to form a structure, it's plausible they would be able to rebuild something.

Yeah Michael Levine is the efing king, has many interesting theories and experiments, highly recommend if you are into biology and bio-cybernetics.

Anyone interested in this should read The Body Electric. Becker was loosely aware of this phenomenon many years ago.

I have seen several podcasts with Michael Levin now and it is really brilliant work he and his team are doing.

For what it's worth he also comes across as a really nice guy.

he's

- very patient - much older than it appear (his research is already on trial in the lab maybe :) - has found the way to make days longer than 24h, he's on 1330 podcasts a week

I (and many others, I’m sure) had the pleasure of listening to him on the Lex Friedman podcast. I’ve listened to that episode three times, I really enjoy it. Not only did he discuss his research, but he also dips into the philosophical domain - connecting electromagnetic communication between cells to philosophy of the mind and the self. I don’t know what that itch is, be he scratched it.

Read "The Body Electric", 1998, by Robert O' Becker MD.

Also, read "Cross Currents" by same author.

...how bioelectricity provides the blueprint for how our bodies are built—and how it could be the future of regenerative medicine.

DNA is the blueprint for how the body builds itself. I wish them well in exploring this and figuring out how to more effectively foster advanced healing of serious damage, but the body already has this info.

/2 cents from a person who no longer has a hole in her lung

If you are a flatworm. Whether this is even conceivable in mammals i m mot sure

Paul Rand is the complete opposite of Rand Paul in both name and deed.

So, Mary Shelley (and her character, Viktor Frankenstein) was right?

Wow super fascinating

hell yeah demonslayer irl

Cool so we just gonna make Space Marines now? Nice

So now the scientific community accepts chi. About time. The reality of bioenergy is obvious to anyone who's practiced chi kung or experienced their chakras.

No. What's being discussed here has nothing to do with the pseudoscience of chi or chakras.

We're seeing how the west is discovering those "chakras" and unlike the east, where the understanding of this topic is very broad and fuzzy, due to lack of experience in most cases, the west will develop a very narrow, but very sharp knowledge. Pair that with the thick dark cloud of nihilism enveloping the west today, and it's not hard to see where this will end up. Levin seems to have discovered what the east calls "etheric double" - a sort of living blueprint that guides the construction of any organic lifeform. That blueprint is of magnetic nature, and although it's not quite the same thing that flows in our copper wires, it easily interacts with the type of magnets at our disposal. From this point the discovery of inflow and outflow sinks of that "bioelectricity" is near.

Can you explain what you mean by "a very narrow, but very sharp knowledge"

It's well captured in the Feynman's quote: "shut up and calculate". When a typical western scientist sees a flatworm regrowing itself from pieces, his mind thinks of the mechanics of this process and little else. Someone with the eastern mindset is going to think about lots of fuzzy abstractions, such as the nature of lifeforce, but will not bother with boring details.

OMG here we go with the marginalization term "Pseudoscience". Stereotyping things you don't understand doesn't make you a smart person.

Chi and chakras are very well understood to not be science, so "pseudoscience" is a very accurate description.

"Science" is "The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena."

Things investigated by science are not in themselves science. That doesn't make them pseudoscience.

Its funny how people use terms to confirm their own particular bias. Cognitive dissonance at its finest.

Protoscience or a mix of abductive and inductive reasoning should not be entirely dismissed because it is not yet deductible. Often the process of "knowing" and developing axiomatic systems comes from first unknowing and grasping, and that doesn't even get into the incompleteness of axiomatic systems. We are refiners, we refine; your diamonds come from the dirt and are the next diamond's dirt.

If you believe chi to be some kind of pseudoscience rather than something easily experienced you're in no position to tell us how it relates to what's being discussed here, as you demonstrate your ignorance.

Are you the kind that would've scoffed and made the same condescending remarks when scientists proposed to study what buddhist monks were doing?

I for one am happy people actually took the time to investigate their practices, including fascinating things like "tummo". See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tummo#Scientific_investigation

This extremely close-minded, arrogant, and disdainful attitude is utterly unscientific.

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