Michael Levin

It's just very convenient because-

You know, we keep the adults in this very fine frog habitat.

They lay eggs.

They lay tens of thousands of eggs at a time.

The eggs develop right in front of your eyes.

It's the most magical thing you can see because normally, you know, if you were to deal with mice or rabbits or whatever, you don't see the early stages because everything's inside the mother.

Everything's in a petri dish at room temperature.

So you have an egg, it's fertilized, and you can just watch it divide and divide and divide and all the organs form.

You can just see it.

And at that point, the community has developed lots of different tools for understanding what's going on and also for manipulating it, right?

So people use it for understanding birth defects and neurobiology and cancer immunology also.

That's so cool to watch.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

There's amazing videos online.

I mean, mammalian embryos are super cool too.

For example, monozygotic twins are what happens when you cut a mammalian embryo in half.

You don't get two half bodies.

You get two perfectly normal bodies because it's a regeneration event, right?

Development is just the kind of regeneration, really.