Michael Levin, Ph.D
Most problems of biomedicine boil down to one question: How do swarms of cells decide what anatomical structure to build? If we knew how to manage the cooperation of cells towards specific forms, we would have the solution to birth defects, traumatic injury, cancer, and aging. While tremendous progress has been made on the molecular mechanisms necessary for morphogenesis, serious knowledge gaps exist with respect to the algorithms sufficient to enable cells to reliably make, and repair, complex structures. In this talk, I will describe a new way to think about this process: as the behavior of a collective intelligence in anatomical morphospace. I will show how ancient bioelectric mechanisms serve as a kind of cognitive glue, enabling all body tissues to store pattern memories and make decisions about growth and form, and describe the tools and computational frameworks we have developed to read and write information into the cognitive system of this tissue-level agent. I will discuss the impacts of life’s multiscale competency architecture on evolution, its relationship to the genomically-specified cellular hardware, and the emerging field of diverse intelligence. By learning to understand and exploit the software of the body, we gain novel understanding of our evolutionary origins and a new roadmap for regenerative medicine and the creation of novel synthetic living proto-organisms.
The NSS lecture series is made possible by generous contributions from Con Edison.