michael levin
from twitter.. [https://twitter.com/drmichaellevin]:
Scientist at Tufts University; my lab studies anatomical and behavioral decision-making at multiple scales of biological, artificial, and hybrid systems.
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from his site.. [drmichaellevin.org]:
Overview of Levin Lab Research
Seeking general principles of life-as-it-can-be, we use a wide range of natural animal models as well as create novel synthetic and chimeric life forms. A driving principle is the search for unification: invariant, *scale-free principles for **intelligence behavior in unfamiliar guises. We are interested in the physics of sentience, and the sentience of physics. We study cells, and cell groups as a **collective intelligence, ***navigating ****diverse *****problem spaces such astranscriptional, physiological, and anatomical morphospace. We characterize and model the various competencies of this process, including its evolutionary origins and the implications it has for the evolutionary process itself. Much of our focus is on the control of anatomical growth and form, but we also study ******decision-making and problem-solving in transcriptional and protein pathways and physiological circuits. We want to understand the robust reliability of default morphogenesis, and the behavior-shaping interfaces that evolution exploits in groups of cells to enable them to create functional novel forms that were never directly evolved. Our work lives at the intersection of a number of disciplines, including developmental biology, artificial life, bioengineering, synthetic morphology, and cognitive science.
*need infinitesimal structures approaching the limit of structureless\ness and/or vice versa .. aka: ginorm/small ness
**perhaps not what legit free people would be about.. ie: intellectness as cancerous distraction et al
***imagine if legit free people are more about wandering ness than navigating ness.. ie: curiosity over decision making et al
****to me.. not the diversity we need (discrimination as equity et al.. rather than finite set of choices) if navigating ness
*****imagine if legit free people wouldn’t be about problem ness.. mufleh humanity law: we have seen advances in every aspect of our lives except our humanity– Luma Mufleh.. et al
i do believe we have a problem/focus.. to me..it’s about detox to get back/to legit free people.. to me.. all other problem/focus ness has been a cancerous distraction (not deep enough to get to the root)
we need a problem deep enough to resonate w/8bn today.. a mechanism simple enough to be accessible/usable to 8bn today.. and an ecosystem open enough to set/keep 8bn legit free
ie: org around a problem deep enough (aka: org around legit needs) to resonate w/8bn today.. via a mechanism simple enough (aka: tech as it could be) to be accessible/usable to 8bn today.. and an ecosystem open enough (aka: sans any form of m\a\p) to set/keep 8bn legit free
******decision making is unmooring us law.. cancerous distraction
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from his wikipedia page.. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Levin_(biologist)]:
Michael Levin is an American developmental and synthetic biologist at Tufts University, where he is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor. Levin is a director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University and Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. He is also co-director of the Institute for Computationally Designed Organisms with Josh Bongard.
Michael Levin was born in Moscow, USSR, in 1969, in a Jewish family. His parents faced antisemitism in the Soviet Union, and in 1978 took advantage of a visa program for Soviet Jews and moved the family to Lynn, Massachusetts. Levin’s father was a computer programmer and worked for the Soviet weather service; his mother was a concert pianist.
Levin’s family immigration was sponsored by Temple Sinai in Marblehead, Massachusetts. His family is still members of Temple Sinai. Levin stated that “… I’ve always lived within about a mile radius of where we landed in ’78.”
Levin received dual bachelor’s degrees in computer science and biology from Tufts University, and a Ph. D. in genetics from Harvard University (working in the lab of Cliff Tabin). His post-doctoral training was in the Cell Biology department of Harvard School of Medicine with Mark Mercola. Levin first established his independent lab at the Forsyth Institute in 2000. His research interests include: bioelectrical signals by which cells communicate to serve the dynamic anatomical needs of the organism during development, regeneration, and cancer suppression; basal cognition and intelligence in diverse unconventional substrates; and top-down control of form and function across scales in biology. He moved his group to Tufts in 2009. In 2010, he also became an associate member of the Wyss Institute of Harvard Medical School.
mikey siegel et al.. zach bush et al.. regeneration et al.. cancer et al.. carhart-harris entropy law et al..
He is known for co-discovering the Xenobots, “Living robots made from frog skin cells can sense their environment”. This research is focused on development of a multiplexed, microfluidic, Xenopus embryo culture system that will enable discovery of new drug targets and development of therapeutics when combined with multiomics and an integrated bioinformatics pipeline. This work was funded by the DARPA L2M program.
As of 2021, Levin’s lab is working on synthetic biology applications of bioelectricity for cellular control; development of a bioinformatics of shape, AI tools for discovery and testing of algorithmic models linking molecular-genetic data to morphogenesis; using techniques from AI, computational neuroscience, and cognitive science to make models of morphogenesis.
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
Levin is co-editor in chief of Bioelectricity, founding associate editor of Collective Intelligence, and is on editorial advisory board of Laterality journals.
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intro’d to michael via thomas o’brien convo et al:
via thomas o’brien after 23 convo:
on resonations of right to city p 1-16 with recent convo w thomas on tech to facil..
just reread (during 2023 reconnection w thomas on vectoring words and words embedding [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQddtTdmG_8&t=604s] and michael levin ness [https://twitter.com/drmichaellevin]) p 1-16 of right to the city.. huge to decision making is unmooring us law ness.. and people trying to protect (safety addiction) via planning/ordering et al.. and aziz let go law and carhart-harris entropy law.. et al
avi on decision making might be of interest.. avi is one from museum of care i was telling you about maria desribing him ‘anthropologist of deplorable animals, Dr Khalil ‘Avi’ Betz-Heinemann’
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
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much later via tweet [https://x.com/donalddhoffman/status/1893829595209568374]:
“What if medicine could harness the body’s innate healing ability with precision, using technology to direct the body to repair damaged tissues and organs, or even regenerate them entirely?”
Mike Levin is brilliant.
notes/quotes from feb 2025 article:
The quest for a “communication device” that tells cells to regenerate the body..t
communicative device we need most/first: nonjudgmental exponential labeling to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. so we can try/see the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
“Can we push these cells to do something other than what they normally do?” asks developmental biologist Michael Levin. “Can they build something completely different?”
What if medicine could harness the body’s innate healing ability with precision, using technology to direct the body to repair damaged tissues and organs, or even regenerate them entirely?
That’s a fundamental question driving the field of regenerative medicine.
Big Think spoke with developmental biologist Michael Levin about the future of regenerative and bioelectric medicine — and the quest to build a device that can communicate with cells, steering their behavior toward our desired health goals.
to me.. need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs.. ie: grok legit desires.. itch-in-the-soul.. et al
The research hints at a larger idea: Biological systems don’t just passively follow genetic instructions — they adapt. Cells seem to “figure out” solutions to new problems, sometimes in ways scientists can’t yet explain.
What if medicine could harness this innate healing ability with precision, using technology to direct the body to repair damaged tissues and organs, or even regenerate them entirely?
to me.. we don’t need precision.. as much as deeper listening.. uncovering.. trusting that the dance is still in each one of us/bodies.. just disturbed.. so need a means to undisturb
That’s the fundamental question driving regenerative medicine. About to enter its golden age, the field is coinciding with exciting developments in biology, computational neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to usher in what Tufts University Professor Michael Levin calls a kind of “somatic psychiatry” — and it may just be the future of medicine
somatic: relating to body esp as distinct from mind
Importantly, this works not because scientists tell the body how to regenerate, as is the case with stem cell therapy; they only tell it what to grow and where. The body takes care of the rest on its own
still too much people telling other people what to do ness.. we need a means (and have it) to just listen to what is already on each heart
But one reason that bioelectric networks hold promise for treating disease is because they are exactly that: networks. It is easy to overlook the fact that “everything is connected” within the human body, but that’s precisely the point — when things become disconnected, trouble tends to arise.
right.. but when we .. as intoxicated whales.. try to reconnect us/it with our intellectness.. it just becomes a cancerous distraction
Along these lines, Levin calls cancer “a disorder of collective intelligence,” meaning it occurs when cells disconnect from the goals of the larger electrical network of which they are a part. “When they disconnect, they can no longer remember this giant thing they’re working on.” The cells are not more “selfish” than normal cells — they just have smaller selves. This “dissociative identity disorder” leads them to pursue single-cell goals, which quickly get out of hand. Using diagnostics based on a bioelectric signature, future regenerative scientists may be able to detect cells that are about to disconnect from the network and intervene before it’s too late.
“What if we reconnected these cells with their neighbors — not killed them with toxic chemotherapy, just reconnected them?”
bush communication law et al
In a way, the approach is more similar to behavior science than biology. Levin compares modern molecular medicine to a mechanical clock, where researchers are focused on “rewiring the hardware.” The assumption, he says, is that tissues and cells are like parts of a clock that need to be manually wired or rewired in a certain way. But what if medicine is more like classical conditioning, or even psychoanalysis?
again.. we can go deeper.. ie: there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
“You can change the goals and behaviors of a complex organism just by interacting with it, even once,” Levin says. “You can say to a human, ‘You really should go to grad school’ and they say, ‘Yeah, you’re right’ and then it’s ten years of effort because you said this one thing. You didn’t manually wire all of the possible outcomes of going or not going to grad school and manually set things into motion, or reward or punish them for it; their brains did all of the hypothetical work.”
maté trump law et al
The assumption that cells and tissues are low-agency things like mechanical clocks, Levin says, has been proven false. Instead, living tissues are what he calls “agential materials”: They have agendas, learning capacities, and memory. The real advances in regenerative medicine, he says, are going to be had by people who make use of this in a way that looks a little like what he calls somatic psychiatry.
“You should be able to sit in front of a computer and draw exactly what you want — the plant, animal, organ, biobot, whatever” whether it’s a normal heart or a frog with a propeller and wings. “After that, you compile those goals into a set of stimuli that gets the system to build what you want it to build. That’s the endgame.” ..t
and again.. endgame = same song until we get a global detox leap/re\set
black science of people/whales law et al
Levin reiterated that this hypothetical “anatomical compiler” would not be a 3D printer for stem cells, molecular pathways, or proteins. Rather, the device would translate your goals into the goals of the tissues and cells.
all goals to date = whalespeak.. need 1st/most means to undo our hierarchical listening
A separate but not totally unrelated project Levin’s lab is working on is AI as a translation tool — a way to “talk” to cells and tissues, with language. “You should be able to say, ‘Hey liver, why do I feel like crap today?’ and for it to say, ‘Have you seen your potassium levels? And by the way, I’ve talked to the fridge and I know what you’ve been eating, so here’s what I suggest.’” There’s huge potential for using LLMs to interpret intelligence all around you. Just like how we didn’t know there was an electromagnetic spectrum around us.
again.. don’t need intellectness (aka: cancerous distraction)/interp ness.. need means to listen better/deeper to what’s already on each heart.. aka: the dance
“There are minds within us and all around us, and I think AI can help us see those things.”
for that.. need tech as nonjudgmental expo labeling.. for (blank)’s sake
For Levin, the future of regenerative medicine is about learning to communicate and collaborate with — and exploit the intelligent capabilities of — the agential material of life.
“When I put barriers in front of [an organism’s] goals, and they find ingenious ways of getting around what I’ve done and get their goals met anyway — that is intelligence.
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be you. 