Hey, it's great to see you again.
Great to see you too. Mind if we take a little walk?
What is your favorite breakfast food?
Well, if I had a choice, I would be eating probably French toast.
Is that what you had for breakfast this morning?
Absolutely not. I never get to eat it. I had Icelandic yogurt and Ezekiel cereal.
Can you describe yourself in three words?
That's fair. That counts. In 30 seconds or less, what do you do for work?
I lead a team of researchers, and we study all kinds of unconventional intelligences, embodied in, of course, brains, but also all kinds of non-brain and tissue cells, organs, slime molds, and all kinds of engineered objects. And we try to understand how we can use that knowledge to develop both new applications in bioengineering and biomedicine, but also novel systems for ethics of relating to really unconventional beings that are not like us.
A few years ago, your lab got a lot of attention for building the world's first anthrobot. What is an anthrobot?
What it looks like is a little round creature. It has little hairs on its outer surface called cilia that it uses to move itself around. It self-assembles from adult human tracheal epithelial cells. It is also a platform that we can use for therapeutic bio-robotics. So specifically patient-derived interventions that can be injected back into the body wouldn't need immune suppression. They do interesting things like heal neural wounds and probably many other things that we don't yet know.
So cool. What was your PhD dissertation topic?
Yeah, my PhD topic was about how collections of cells in an embryo determine which side is left and which side is right. And it was the first time we understood molecularly how cells decide which side of the body they're on.
Can you show me something awesome?
I can right here. Happen to, since we're not in the lab, I can't show you a real one, but I will show you this.
So this is a toy, it's a stuffed planarian flatworm made by the students of Charles Abramson, who's a collaborator of ours who works in the animal behavior. And so the planaria of which this is an example, are an absolutely amazing creature that contains within itself all of the mysteries of life and mind, basically. So planaria have a number of interesting properties. First of all, if you chop them into pieces, so you can chop them this way, you can chop them this way, you can chop them this way. However you cut, the record is something like 275 pieces, if you chop them into pieces, every single piece regenerates to make a perfect little worm. So every piece knows exactly what the whole thing is supposed to look like, and they rebuild. That's the first thing. The second thing is planaria are smart and you can train them. And if you train them and then you chop off their head, which contains their brain, you chop off their head, the tail will regrow a new head, and that new worm will remember the original training. So what they're telling you is that, A, learned information is not stored entirely in the brain, it is somehow distributed somewhere else, and B, it is imprinted onto the new brain as it develops. So this gives us the idea that, first of all, that information can move through tissues, which is really important. And it tells us something about the future of regenerative medicine for human patients, because, for example, someday when we are replacing, let's say in the context of degenerative brain disease or even aging, we're replacing components of the brain with the progeny of naive stem cells or some kind of, you know, new cellular source, the question is, what's going to happen to the memories, the personality of that patient? And this suggests that at least in some creatures, there's the ability to re-imprint new cognitive content onto a novel real estate that shows up in the brain. And they don't age. So asexual strains of planaria, which basically reproduce by cutting themselves in half and regenerating, there is no evidence of aging. They go on forever. The worms that we have in our lab are in physical continuity with worms that were here 400 million years ago. So this is also telling us that it is possible to be a highly regenerative, cancer resistant, intelligent organism without aging, you do not have to age and die. The planaria are telling us that it's somehow possible.
Wow, that is a lot for a tiny little animal to be able to do. Do you think at some point we would be able to be immortal and cancer free?
The planaria are telling us that it is possible, and as long as when we say we, we don't mean we as we are exactly right now. So this particular stage of modern human evolution frozen in time and maintained, that particular embodiment has all kinds of limitations of physical limitations, mental limitations, and so on. As long as we are ready to understand that we are more than our bodies, we're more than our genes, and we are willing to change, and grow, and transform. And I think absolutely, this is what our future looks like.
