Michael Levin

Normally, when all these cells are connected by gap junctions into an electrical network, they are all one self, right?

Meaning that...

Their goals, they have these large tissue level goals and so on.

As soon as a cell is disconnected from that, the self is tiny, right?

And so at that point, and so a lot of people model cancer cells as being more selfish and all that.

They're not more selfish.

They're equally selfish.

It's just that their self is smaller.

Normally, the self is huge.

Now they got tiny little selves.

Now, what are the goals of tiny little selves?

Well, proliferate and migrate to wherever life is good.

And that's metastasis.

That's proliferation and metastasis.

So, so one thing we found and people have noticed years ago that when cells convert to cancer, the first thing they see is they close the gap junctions.

And it's a lot like, I think it's a lot like that experiment with the slime mold where until you close that gap junction, you can't even entertain the idea of leaving the collective because there is no you at that point, right?

Your mind melded with this, with this whole other network.

But as soon as the gap junction is closed, now the boundary between you and now the rest of the body is just outside environment to you.

You're just a unicellular organism in the rest of the body's environment.

So we studied this process and we worked out a way to artificially control the bioelectric state of these cells to physically force them to remain in that network.