Michael Levin

And so part of – there's a couple of papers.

That's one paper and there's another one that Josh Bongard and I wrote where we really attack the terminology.

And we say these binary categories are based on very –

non-essential kind of surface uh limitations of of technology and imagination that were true before but they've got to go and so and so we call them xenobots so so xeno for xenopus lavis it's the frog that these guys are made of but we think it's an example of of of a biobot technology because

Ultimately, once we understand how to communicate and manipulate the inputs to these cells, we will be able to get them to build whatever we want them to build.

And that's robotics, right?

It's the rational construction of machines that have useful purposes.

I absolutely think that this is a robotics platform, whereas some biologists don't.

And in the future, all of this will merge together because, of course, at some point, we're going to throw in synthetic biology circuits, right?

New transcriptional circuits to get them to do new things.

Of course, we'll throw some of that in.

But we specifically stayed away from all of that because in the first few papers, and there's some more coming down the pike that are, I think, going to be pretty dynamite.

that we want to show what the native cells are made of.

Because what happens is, you know, if you engineer the heck out of them, right?

If we were to put in new, you know, new transcription factors and some new metabolic machinery and whatever, people will say, well, okay, you engineered this and you made it do whatever and fine.

I wanted to show and the whole team wanted to show the plasticity and the intelligence in the biology.

What does it do that's surprising before you even start manipulating the hardware in that way?

The frog.

Xenopus laevis, yeah.

It's been used since I think the 50s.