How do cells cooperate toward creating and maintaining complex body structures? How do cells know what to build and when to stop? Endogenous bioelectric signaling functions as a cognitive glue, binding individual cells toward a collective intelligence that navigates anatomical space. Groups of cells solve problems across embryogenesis, regeneration, aging, and cancer suppression, using bioelectrical networks to store setpoint patterns. In this talk, I will explain the mechanisms and algorithms by which bioelectric networks implement the mind of the body. An exciting roadmap for definitive regenerative medicine is made possible by targeting the bioelectric interface to reprogram and collaborate with the agential material of life.
Michael Levin is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University, and associate faculty at Harvard’s Wyss Institute. He serves as the director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts and the co-director of the Institute for Computationally Designed Organisms at Tufts/UVM. He has published over 400 peer-reviewed publications across developmental biology, computer science, and philosophy of mind. Dr. Levin received dual B.S. degrees in computer science and biology, followed by a Ph.D. from Harvard with Clifford Tabin. His graduate work on the molecular basis of left-right asymmetry (Cell 1995) was chosen by the journal Nature as a “Milestone in Developmental Biology in the last century”. He did post-doctoral training at Harvard School of Medicine in cell biology, and started his independent lab in 2000, developing the first molecular tools to read and write bioelectric prepatterns in non-neural tissue. His group at Tufts works to understand information processing and problem-solving across scales, in a range of naturally evolved, synthetically engineered, and hybrid living systems. The Levin lab has pioneered approaches to organ regeneration, cancer reprogramming, non-genetic modification of the bodyplan, and the engineering of novel living proto-organisms. Using tools from behavioral and computer science, Dr. Levin seeks to understand the collective intelligence of cells and harness their problem-solving capacities for applications in birth defects, regeneration, cancer, and synthetic bioengineering.