14th Season Opener: Michael Levin on ‘The New Biology’

For over a hundred years, biologists have been working to fully understand biology at the level of chemistry, in other words unite biology with chemistry. This is considered the reductive approach inspired by the unification of chemistry with physics in the early 20th century with the Periodic Table and the Bohr model of the atom. In the attempt to reduce biology to chemistry, the gene has been the star player. 

The gene linked phenotype to the molecules of chemistry and to the more abstract and promising world of information. 

There have been many great successes, from new understanding and treatment of cancer to gene therapy for sickle cell disease. There have also been many failures. Drugs flop and are not approved; diagnostics fall short; and much about our bodies remains shrouded in mystery. Over the years, we have heard that if DNA sequencing (the way we characterize genes and the genome) was much cheaper and we just did more of it, then we would solve the hard questions. 

In the meantime, some researchers are taking a new approach to biology. Many consider themselves non-reductionists, and they are looking for answers beyond the genome.Today, we begin our 14th season with a new series exploring these alternated approaches to biology with Michael Levin, a developmental and synthetic biologist and professor at Tufts University. Mike also directs the Allen Discovery Center and the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology and is co-director of the Institute for Computationally Designed Organisms.   He has a Wyss Institute appointment at Harvard.

Mike’s less traveled path is focused on the innate intelligence of tissues and organs. He argues that networks of cells are goal-oriented and achieve their goals through the medium of bioelectricity, a kind of proto-brain.   He knows that terms like "intelligence” and “goal” are taboo in the field and insists on fundamental basic definitions for the terms.  The idea is to go in and “reprogram” the goals of a group of cells and let them do the work of reversing disease.  Talk about gene therapy—Mike says he can imagine biological machines that are already in our bodies finding and repairing damaged DNA, tissue, and organs. Already, he has published work of reprogramming nematode worms to have two heads or to express their head on a different part of their bodies.  You can find over 300 publications on his website where he has painstakingly laid out his ideas and detailed his successes.

We’re very excited to get Mike on the show to discuss his work and the implications.  What response is he hearing from the research community? What is his roadmap for the future? Should there be a change in priorities among funding agencies such as NIH?  "I want to get across one very simple idea from which bioelectricity and a million other things flow—and I’m not the only one saying this—and that is the idea that the need to go down to the level of chemistry for understanding and control is just an assumption.  It is not necessarily the optimal level,” he says.

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