Michael Levin

And Dave Kaplan's lab makes these things.

And inside it's a it's a very controlled environment.

It is a silk gel that carries some drugs, for example, ion channel drugs.

And what you're doing is you're saying to these cells.

You should regrow what normally goes here.

So that whole thing is on for 24 hours.

Then you take it off.

You don't touch the leg again.

This is really important because what we're not looking for is a set of micromanagement, you know, printing or controlling the cells.

We want to trigger.

We want to interact with it early on and then not touch it again because we don't know how to make a frog leg.

But the frog knows how to make a frog leg.

So 24 hours.

18 months of leg growth after that without us touching it again and after 18 months you get a pretty good leg that kind of shows this proof of concept that early on when the cells right after injury when they're first making a decision about what they're going to do you can you can impact them and once they've decided to make a leg they don't need you after that they can you know do their own thing so that's an approach that we're now taking what about cancer suppression that's something you mentioned earlier how can all of these ideas help with cancer suppression

So let's go back to the beginning and ask what cancer is.

So I think, you know, asking why there's cancer is the wrong question.

I think the right question is why is there ever anything but cancer?

So in the normal state, you have a bunch of cells that are all cooperating towards a large scale goal.

If that process of cooperation breaks down and you've got a cell that is isolated from that electrical network that lets you remember what the big goal is, you revert back to your unicellular lifestyle.

Now, think about that border between self and world, right?