Michael Levin

uh for you know for repairing uh birth defects of the brain in frog we've done some of this for normalizing melanoma uh where you can really start to use ai to make models of how would i impact this thing if i wanted to given all the complexities right and and given all the uh the the controls that it knows how to do so when you say regenerative medicine so we talked about

Well, today there's a set of popular approaches.

So one is 3D printing.

So the idea is I'm going to make a scaffold of the thing that I want.

I'm going to seed it with cells and then there it is.

Right.

So kind of direct.

And then that works for certain things.

You can make a bladder that way or an ear or something like that.

The other the other idea is some sort of stem cell transplant.

The idea is if we

If we put in stem cells with appropriate factors, we can get them to generate certain kinds of neurons for certain diseases and so on.

All of those things are good for relatively simple structures.

But when you want an eye or a hand or something else, I think, and this may be an unpopular opinion, I think the only hope we have in any reasonable kind of timeframe is...

is to understand how the thing was motivated to get made in the first place.

So what is it that made those cells in the beginning create a particular arm with a particular set of sizes and shapes and number of fingers and all that?

And why is it that a salamander can keep losing theirs and keep regrowing theirs?

And a planarian can do the same, even more so.

To me, kind of ultimate regenerative medicine was when you can tell the cells to build whatever it is you need them to build.

And so we can all be like Planaria, basically.