(Roughly) Daily

George Musser talks with biologist Michael Levin about his practice of uncovering the incredible, latent abilities of living things…

Michael Levin, a developmental biologist at Tufts University, has a knack for taking an unassuming organism and showing it’s capable of the darnedest things. He and his team once extracted skin cells from a frog embryo and cultivated them on their own. With no other cell types around, they were not “bullied,” as he put it, into forming skin tissue. Instead, they reassembled into a new organism of sorts, a “xenobot,” a coinage based on the Latin name of the frog species, Xenopus laevis. It zipped around like a paramecium in pond water. Sometimes it swept up loose skin cells and piled them until they formed their own xenobot—a type of self-replication. For Levin, it demonstrated how all living things have latent abilities. Having evolved to do one thing, they might do something completely different under the right circumstances.

Not long ago I met Levin at a workshop on science, technology, and Buddhism in Kathmandu. He hates flying but said this event was worth it. Even without the backdrop of the Himalayas, his scientific talk was one of the most captivating I’ve ever heard. Every slide introduced some bizarre new experiment. Butterflies retain memories from when they were caterpillars, even though their brains turned to mush in the chrysalis. Cut off the head and tail of a planarian, or flatworm, and it can grow two new heads; if you amputate again, the worm will regrow both heads. Levin argues the worm stores the new shape in its body as an electrical pattern. In fact, he thinks electrical signaling is pervasive in nature; it is not limited to neurons. Recently, Levin and colleagues found that some diseases might be cured by retraining the gene and protein networks as one might train a neural network. But when I sat down to talk to the audacious biologist on the hotel patio, I mostly wanted to hear about slime mold…

Read on for a fascinating conversation: “The Biologist Blowing Our Minds,” @drmichaellevin and @gmusser in @NautilusMag.

* Margaret E. Barber

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As we’re amazed, we might send tidy birthday greetings to Irwin Rose; he was born on this date in 1926. A biologist and biochemist, he shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation.

Ubiquitin is a small protein molecule that attaches to other proteins, tagging them for removal, which are thus recognized by the cell’s proteasomes. These structures are the cell’s waste-disposal units, allowing the proteins to be broken down into tiny pieces for reuse; this ubiquitin-mediated process cleans up unwanted proteins resulting during cell division, and performs quality control on newly synthesized proteins… which matters, as faulty protein-breakdown processes lead to such conditions as cystic fibrosis, several neurodegenerative diseases, and certain types of cancer.

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