Michael Levin: The First Human-Cell Robots Are Here
Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal
Curt Jaimungal
4.6 • 606 Ratings
🗓️ 17 January 2024
⏱️ 96 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | We have a world exclusive today by the time this airs. |
| 0:02.9 | It will have just been announced that two of your papers, with you, Michael Levin, have been published with your co-authors, which are here, Gizem, Goumishkaya, and Angela Tung. |
| 0:14.5 | So, Michael, I'd like you to explain what these papers are, and then Gizem and Angela, I'd like you to explain respectively the significance of those papers. |
| 0:23.1 | So Michael, please. |
| 0:24.7 | Yeah, sure. |
| 0:26.1 | Yeah, it's really interesting to me that these are all coming out at the same time because |
| 0:30.9 | there's a kind of a fundamental similarity here. |
| 0:34.9 | One, so Gizems has to do with something we call anthropots, which are these, |
| 0:40.1 | it's a new bi-robotics platform. They're made of human, human cells, and they're kind of |
| 0:46.7 | a self-motile construct that has all kinds of possibilities for medicine and for |
| 0:53.1 | telling us about evolution and development |
| 0:55.9 | and so on and so because then we'll talk about that um angela's uh paper is about the ability of |
| 1:01.3 | embryos to communicate with each other and to help each other resist various teratogenic influences |
| 1:06.8 | so so things that would normally cause developmental defects it turns out that a group, embryos are able to work together to better overcome those kinds of influences. |
| 1:18.0 | And so what these things have in common is really our attempts to understand where biological information comes from. |
| 1:26.0 | Because in the one case, so in the Anthrobot case, |
| 1:29.5 | we have this coherent construct that is using a completely wild type human genome to make a |
| 1:36.5 | form and function that are not the typical things you see in the normal human target morphology. |
| 1:41.9 | In the case of Angelus paper, what you see is that the |
| 1:45.6 | robustness of development is not just the property of a single embryo with its own genome, |
| 1:51.1 | but actually a group phenomenon where a number of, in fact, the larger, the group the better, |
| 1:56.8 | large collections of embryos are able to together solve the problem of morphogenesis better than |
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