Michael Levin

And you should be doing that for ideas that that that really fire you up inside.

and really don't let the common denominator of standardized approaches to things slow you down.

I think that it's certainly a factor that promotes change and turnover and an opportunity to do something different the next time for a larger scale system.

So apoptosis, you know, it's really interesting.

I mean, death is really interesting in a number of ways.

One is like you could think about what was the first thing to die?

You know, that's an interesting question.

What was the first creature that you could say actually died?

It's a tough thing because we don't have a great definition for it.

So if you bring a cabbage home and you put it in your fridge,

at what point are you going to say it's died, right?

So it's kind of hard to know.

There's also, there's one paper in which I talk about this idea that, I mean, think about this and imagine that you have a creature that's aquatic, let's say it's a frog or something, or a tadpole, and the animal dies in the pond, it dies for whatever reason.

Most of the cells are still alive.

So you could imagine that if when it died, there was some sort of breakdown of the connectivity between the cells, a bunch of cells crawled off, they could have a life as amoebas.

Some of them could join together and become a xenobot and toodle around, right?

So we know from planaria that there are cells that don't obey the Hayflick limit and just sort of live forever.

So you could imagine an organism that when the organism dies, it doesn't disappear.

Rather, the individual cells that are still alive

crawl off and have a completely different kind of lifestyle and maybe come back together as something else, or maybe they don't.