Michael Levin

You can have other information in there and it's reprogrammable by us, by bacteria, by various parasites, probably things like that.

The other amazing thing about these planarias, think about this.

Most animals, when we get a mutation in our bodies, our children don't inherit it, right?

So you could go on, you could run around for 50, 60 years getting mutations.

Your children don't have those mutations because we go through the egg stage.

Planaria tear themselves in half, and that's how they reproduce.

So for 400 million years, they keep every mutation that they've had that doesn't kill the cell that it's in.

So when you look at these planaria, their bodies are what's called mixoploid, meaning that every cell might have a different number of chromosomes.

They look like a tumor.

If you look at the...

The genome is an incredible mess because they accumulate all this stuff.

And yet, their body structure is... They are the best regenerators on the planet.

Their anatomy is rock solid, even though their genome is all kinds of crap.

So this is kind of a scandal, right?

That, you know, when we learn...

What are genomes?

Genomes determine your body.

Why does the animal with the worst genome have the best anatomical control, the most cancer-resistant, the most regenerative?

Really, we're just beginning to start to understand this relationship between the genomically determined hardware.

By the way, just as of a couple of months ago, I think I now somewhat understand why this is, but it's really a major puzzle.