The Xenopus Adpole

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Michele: This is an interesting podcast for me to think about organizing and talking about. And i finally hit on a starting point of asking you about one of the experiments you describe in your papers with the xenopus tadpole. You basically rearranged the face of a little baby frog tadpole, and it somehow, nevertheless, grew correctly into the right shape. Micheal: What this is telling us is that the genetic in fact, gives us a system that's very good at reducing error. That what it does is continuously work to sort of reduce the difference, the delta, between the configuration you have now and the configuration that it remembers as a correct frog face.

As a semi-outsider, it’s fun for me to watch as a new era dawns in biology: one that adds ideas from physics, big data, computer science, and information theory to the usual biological toolkit. One of the big areas of study in this burgeoning field is the relationship between the basic bioinformatic building blocks (genes and proteins) to the macroscopic organism that eventually results. That relationship is not a simple one, as we’re discovering. Standard metaphors notwithstanding, an organism is not a machine based on genetic blueprints. I talk with biologist and information scientist Michael Levin about how information and physical constraints come together to make organisms and selves.

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Michael Levin received his Ph.D. in genetics from Harvard University. He is currently Distinguished Professor and Vannevar Bush Chair in the Biology department at Tufts University, and serves as director of the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. His work on left-right asymmetric body structures is on Nature’s list of 100 Milestones of Developmental Biology of the Century.

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