Michael Levin

Because the cells might get less responsive.

In other words, the cells are sluggish.

The patterns are fine.

They're having a harder time making the cells do what they need to do.

And that maybe what you need to do is not reinforce the memories.

Maybe what you need to do is make the cells more responsive to them.

And that is a different research agenda, which we are also doing.

We have evidence for that as well, actually, now.

And then we published it recently.

And so my point here is when we tell these crazy sci-fi stories, the only worth to them and the only reason I'm talking about them now, and I hadn't been up a year ago, I wasn't talking about this stuff, is because these are now actionable in terms of specific experimental research agendas that are heading to the clinic, I hope.

in some of these biomedical approaches.

And so now here we can go beyond this and we can say, okay, so up until now, we've considered what are disease states?

Well, we know there's organic disease.

Something is physically broken.

We can see the tissue is breaking down.

There's this damage in the joint, you know, where the liver is doing whatever, you know, we can see these things.

But what about disease states that are not physical states?

They're physiological states or informational states or cognitive problems.

So in other words, in all of these other spaces, you can start to ask, what's a barrier in gene expression space?

What's a local minimum that traps you in physiological state space?