Could Biological Robots Heal Us from the Inside? Michael Levin - #525
Into the Impossible With Brian Keating
Brian Keating
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 28 October 2025
⏱️ 48 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | You know, we like to think we understand what makes something a lot. DNA, evolution, natural selection, the usual suspects. But what if I told you that cells from your own trachea, sitting in a petri dish right now, could spontaneously organize into swimming robots that heal brain tissue? What if frog skin cells, with no genetic modification whatsoever, could build copies of themselves from spare parts lying around? This isn't science fiction. This is the work of Michael Levin at Tufts University, and it's completely rewriting the rules of biology. So we took cells from adult human patients, tracheal epithelial cells. Turns out that they too come together and form these little motile creatures, we call them anthrobots. Those guys have 9,000 differently expressed genes, and they can do cool things like they can heal neural wounds. |
| 0:39.1 | And this is just the tip of the iceberg. |
| 0:40.8 | Michael Levin's research challenges are fundamental understanding of what life is and where biological |
| 0:46.1 | properties emerge from. |
| 0:47.6 | Michael Levin is a distinguished biologist at Tufts University and director of the Allen Discovery Center, |
| 0:52.4 | whose groundbreaking research on bioelectricity and regenerative biology |
| 0:55.9 | is reshaping our understanding of how biological systems process information and pursue goals. |
| 1:01.5 | His xenobots, living robots built from frog cells, |
| 1:04.2 | swim around, work together, and reproduce in ways that have never existed on Earth. |
| 1:07.8 | What does this tell us about consciousness, intelligence, and the nature of life itself? Professor Mike 11, welcome to the Into the Impossible podcast. Thank you for having me. |
| 1:15.8 | It's great to see you. We have so many questions. We'll run out of time before we run out of |
| 1:19.8 | questions, I'm sure. But I want to first start with the big picture question. Why is electricity |
| 1:26.6 | of all the fundamental forces of nature, nuclear forces, |
| 1:30.2 | strong and weak, gravitation, why is it that electricity and not say magnetism plays such an outsized |
| 1:36.2 | role when we know that electricity and magnetism are unified via Maxwell's equation? So why does |
| 1:40.8 | electricity play a bigger role than, say, these magnets here that I have on my desk do? |
| 1:45.5 | It is certainly the case that living tissue is sensitive to magnetic fields, electromagnetism, you know, ultra-weak photons are important. |
| 1:54.7 | All of these things are important. |
| 1:56.4 | I have no idea if biology can harness the stronger than, you know, or the weak of force. |
| 2:02.1 | I just don't know. |
| 2:03.6 | You can do it. |
| 2:04.3 | Yeah, maybe. |
... |
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