Michael Levin, master of bioelectricity
He put an eye on a frog's belly and a head on a worm's tail
Longevity Hound
May 25, 2023
Michael Levin, who might one day figure out how to regrow arms, legs, or eyes
Who we're talking about: Michael Levin, a professor of biology at Tufts University. Levin's topic of interest is "bioelectricity." I'd never even heard of that topic before I’d heard of Levin — but it's fascinating.
How do wounds know to heal? How do hands know to assume the shape they have? From a New Yorker article about Levin:
"It’s tempting to think that genes contain blueprints for the body and its parts. But there is no map or instruction set for an organ inside a cell. 'The first decisions you make are not behavior decisions, they’re growth decisions,' Levin told me, and the most crucial choices—'where your eyes go, where your brain goes, which part's going to be a leg, which part's going to be an arm'—emerge without a central directive."
So if there's no central directive, how does it happen? A big part of it is bioelectricity — electrical patterns that cells use to communicate and coordinate. Levin has been able decode and even speak some of that bioelectric language, resulting in freakish but fascinating experiments:
Tadpoles with extra eyes that grow on their bellies, and end up connected to the brain
New “paddle-like limbs“ on frogs that had their legs cut off
Worms with two heads, one on the head side, one on the tail side
The big picture: For several decades, genetics promised to give us complete control over the human body. Then it turned out epigenetics matters immensely too, and scientific interest in epigentics exploded. We might soon see explosion of interest in bioelectricity as well. In Levin's words:
“In an important way, control over three-dimensional shape is the pressing problem of biomedicine. If you think about it, everything other than infection could be handled if we controlled shape. So birth defects, traumatic injury, aging, degenerative disease, cancer. If we could understand what three-dimensional shape really was, we could do almost anything.”
And the news is: Levin will be speaking at Longevity Summit Dublin. I wrote last week about this long conference, which will be happening from August 17 to to 20 in Dublin, Ireland. I will be attending, and I will be particularly interested in hearing Levin speak. In case you would like to be there also, you can get more info here.