Michael Levin

life form we call a xenobot.

And it's this self-motile little thing that has cilia covering its surface.

The cilia are coordinated, so they row against the water and then the thing starts to move and has all kinds of amazing properties.

It has different gene expression, so it has its own novel transcriptome.

It's able to do things like kinematic self-replication, meaning make copies of itself from loose cells that you put in its environment.

It has the ability to respond to sound, which normal embryos don't do.

It has these novel capacities.

And we did that.

And we said, look, here are some amazing features of this novel system.

Let's try to understand where they came from.

And some people said, well, maybe it's a frog specific thing.

You know, maybe this is just something unique to frog cells.

And so he said, okay, what's the furthest you can get from frog embryonic cells?

How about human adult cells?

And so we took cells from adult human patients who were donating tracheal epithelia for biopsies and things like that.

And those cells in, again, no genetic change, nothing like that.

They self-organized into something we call anthrobots, again, self-multi-little creature, 9,000 different gene expressions.

So about half the genome is now different.

And they have interesting abilities.

For example, they can heal human neural wounds.