Michael Levin

and you say, Hey, why does it have certain forms of behavior, certain forms of anatomy, certain forms of physiology?

Why does it have those?

The answer is very, is always the same.

Well, there's a history of evolutionary selection and there's a long, long history going, going back of adaptation and there are certain environments and this is what survived.

And so that's why it has.

So what I, what I wanted to do was, was break out of that mold and to,

to basically force us as a community to dig deeper into where these things come from.

And that means taking away the crutch where you just say, well, it's evolutionary selection.

That's why it looks like that.

So in order to do that, we have to make artificial synthetic beings.

Now, to be clear, we are starting with living cells.

So it's not that they had no evolutionary history.

The cells do.

They had evolutionary history in frogs or humans or whatever.

But the creatures they make and the capabilities that these creatures have were never directly selected for.

And in fact, they never existed.

So you can't tell the same kind of story.

And what I mean is we can take epithelial cells off of an early frog embryo and we don't change the DNA, no synthetic biology circuits, no material scaffolds, no nanomaterials, no weird drugs, none of that.

What we're mostly doing is liberating them from the

instructive influences of the rest of the cells that they were in in their bodies and so when you do that right normally these cells are bullied by their neighboring cells into having a very boring life they become a two-dimensional outer covering for the for the embryo and they keep out the bacteria and that's that so you might ask well what are these cells capable of when you take them away from that influence so when you do that they form another little um