For over a century, biology has centred genes and evolution in its explanations of behaviour. But synthetic biologist Michael Levin is creating new kinds of lifeform, known as biobots, which he argues challenge that picture. Built from unmodified frog and human cells, Levin’s biobots behave in ways that their genomes and evolutionary history fail to predict. In this interview, he tells the IAI’s Alasdair Craig that biology must do better. The solution, he thinks, may involve taking seriously the idea that biobots have minds, and that memory, learning and purposeful behaviour can exist far beyond the brain and its neurons.

Alasdair Craig: Could you give us a brief overview of what you're aiming to do in regenerative medicine and cancer treatment?

Michael Levin: Imagine that you had a way of communicating goals, anatomical goals, to groups of cells, to ask them to build whatever structure you wanted them to build. Then birth defects, traumatic injury, degenerative disease, aging, cancer, all of these things could be solved. This is the major unsolved problem of regenerative medicine. So this is what we do in my group: we work on ways to communicate anatomical goals to groups of cells.

Something that you suggest holds science back is what you call “mind blindness,” and you talk about seeing minds everywhere. So, can you give us an example of evidence of minds where we wouldn’t expect to see them?

Well, just to take a step back, imagine what programming a computer used to look like in the 1940s and ’50s. You’re sitting there in front of this giant thing and sort of pulling connections in and out, right? In those days, you had to interact with the hardware. Now, this is the current assumption of modern molecular medicine: all the excitement is about the hardware. Genomic editing, pathway rewiring, protein engineering, and so on are all about the hardware. And so one of the big questions is: okay, you have that hardware, and we know that in the brain, some of that molecular hardware underlies memory and learning and problem solving and all these other things. The question is, where else might it be found? This notion that it’s only to be found in the brain is just an assumption, not an established scientific fact. My group applies the tools of cognitive and behavioral science to all kinds of other weird substrates, and we’ve found memory and learning capacity in cells and tissues. This opens up all kinds of novel ways to communicate with the living material to try to get it to do things that we don’t know how to micromanage it to do.

What are xenobots and anthrobots, and are they evidence of minds existing in unexpected forms?

So the background to this is that we discovered an interface, namely bioelectricity, which is the ability of cells to join into electrical networks to process memories and goal states, and so on. We can hijack that capacity and communicate with these cells. Now, this is not in human patients yet, but in model systems, we can, for example, induce formation of ectopic organs, normalize tumors into normal tissue, cause limb regeneration, and repair really profound birth defects. And in all of those cases, our goal is to communicate to the cells a particular pattern-memory of what it is that they should be building.

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The space of possible new beings is basically endless because biology is incredibly creative, and you don’t need a lengthy evolutionary history to be able to do these things.

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