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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Uh I like to think of the end game of our field as uh something called the anatomical compiler.
Just think, someday you should be able to sit in front of a computer.
and draw the anatomy of the animal, plant, organ, biobot, whatever it is, you should be able to draw it.
And this system will then compile that uh specification into a set of stimuli that would have to be given to cells to get them to build exactly what you want.
Now, so in this case I'm showing you this uh three-headed uh flatworm.
But if we had something like this, then birth defects, traumatic injury, cancer, aging, degenerative disease, all of these things would go away.
If you could if you could convince cells to build whatever you wanted them to build, all of these things would go away.
Now, why don't we have something like this?
We're actually very far away from it.
uh where where we stand today with uh with molecular medicine is that we're very good at this kind of information, which cells and uh what the cells are doing, what um individual proteins are uh binding to what other proteins, which genes turn on and off other genes.
The molecular information is is uh very strong.
But we're we're quite a a distance away from being able to restore limbs and uh for repair birth defects and things like this.
And so so why is that?
I'm gonna argue that this is because where medicine is today is where computer science was in the 40s and 50s.
In those days, in order to reprogram a computer to get it to do something different, you would have to physically interact with the hardware.
Here she is.
She's rewiring uh the machine to get it to do something different.
And so what I think we've just now started scratching the surface of is to understand uh actually the plasticity and more specifically the intelligence of the living material, meaning that it is reprogrammable and um
For the same reason that uh you would laugh if I told you today that on your laptop to switch from uh uh Microsoft Word to PowerPoint, you'd have to get out your soldering iron and start rewiring the thing, right?
That it's uh we don't we don't do that anymore.
Showing 21–40 of 1,198 · page 2 of 60
← Previous
Next →