Michael Levin

And so what you can do is you can do that in many different ways.

One way is with drugs that target ion channels to say, and so you pick these drugs and you say, okay, I'm going to do it so that instead of this one head, one tail electrical pattern, you have a two-headed pattern, right?

You're just editing the electrical information in the network.

When you do that, guess what the cells build?

They build a two-headed worm.

And the coolest thing about it, now no genetic changes, so we haven't touched the genome.

The genome is totally wild type.

But the amazing thing about it is that when you take these two-headed animals and you cut them into pieces again,

Some of those pieces will continue to make two-headed animals.

So that information, that memory, that electrical circuit, not only does it hold the information for how many heads, not only does it use that information to tell the cells what to do to regenerate, but it stores it.

Once you've reset it, it keeps.

And we can go back.

We can take a two-headed animal and put it back to one-headed.

So there's a couple of interesting things here that have implications for understanding of genomes and things like that.

Imagine I take this two-headed animal.

Oh, and by the way, when they reproduce, when they tear themselves in half, you still get two-headed animals.

So imagine I take them and I throw them in the Charles River over here.

So 100 years later, some scientists come along and they scoop up some samples and they go, oh, there's a single-headed form and a two-headed form.

Wow, a speciation event.

Cool.