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John Carroll: We have a certain paradise in mind about how something complicated like a bookshelf comes to be. When you put together a person or a whale or a there is some blue print, set of instructions that will go into constructing an organism such as a person. But the actual process by which it happens is much more nuanced and richer than we think. And partly that's because, you know, we are not intelligently designed, right? This whole system that we have in us, of dan, a genom, a arena, proteins,. cells in our body, this all evolved in a complicated process.

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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