Michael Levin

speaker

1,198 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard Apr 2025

Michael Levin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal · Michael Levin: Bioelectric Signals That Reprogram Living Organisms · 21 Mar 2025 podcast

And these cells are remaining connected and they are working on the same goal as they were before, making nice skin, nice muscle, whatever.

Okay, so that's it so that's it so that's a story at the level of of single cells.

Now I'm going to um

Show you what this means for uh birth defects.

So here is a uh here's a brain of a tadpole, and you can see here forebrain, mid-brain, and hindbrain.

And uh what we can do is we can uh introduce a mutant to a gene called notch, and that uh that's a very important uh neurogenesis gene.

And so these animals have a very uh abnormal brain.

The forebrain is missing, the midbrain and hindbrain are a big bubble.

You can see the difference.

Uh, these animals are profoundly affected, they have no behavior to speak of.

Uh what we could what we were able to do is to build a computational model of the electrical pattern that normally tells the brain what size and shape it's supposed to be.

supposed to be.

And we simply ask the question, given given this kind of uh disorder, what channels would we have to open and close to get back to the correct shape?

And the computational model gave us an answer.

Uh and we found we found a couple of drugs already human approved.

Uh so this is um uh all already uh kind of already in use in patients for other reasons.

But but when you use them, here's here's what happens.

The uh the brain now you got a normal brain, uh they have actually learning uh rates indistinguishable from controls, and yet they still have mute that mutation.

Okay.

So this is an example, and I'm not saying this will always be possible, but this is an example of f fixing what is

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