In an interview on the Theories of Everything YouTube channel, Michael Levin and two of his colleagues, Gizem Gumuskaya and Angela Tung discussed two just-published scientific papers. This article will focus on Gizem's work on anthrobots. You may wish to watch the entire interview for a more in-depth discussion and also to understand the important work of Angela, which is research into the ability of embryos to communicate with each other and to help each other resist various teratogenic influences.
What Are Anthrobots?
Anthrobots, also called anthropods, are a new "biorobotics platform", a kind of self-motile construct that has many possibilities for use in medicine. Anthrobots are derived from human cells (as distinguished from xenobots created from frog cells.) This new research is an attempt to find out where biological information comes from. The anthrobots are derived from "wild" cells, their DNA is unaltered. So this is not about gene modification. But the morphology of the cells can be altered to do unexpected things, using external influences. This is triggering a paradigm shift in our thinking about biology. They have discovered that nature can actually be a design medium through this new field called synthetic biology, which recognizes that biological structures have embodied computational frameworks that determine their architecture and their function. Biological structures have many more features and possibilities than non-biological human created bots, particularly in ways they can heal.
By giving a human cell environmental inputs, they were able to get it to create a completely novel structure without touching the genome. More research need to be done to determine what all the epigenetic factors are and there are a lot of different possibilities that exactly give rise to the anthropod. So far, though, they were able to get these cells to create a theorized new architecture. "They are the first fully cellular self-constructing biological robots, and they build themselves from single cells.", Gizem Gumuskaya stated. These are fully biological entities with no additional synthetic parts, but are still programmed biologically.
What Can Anthrobots Do?
Gizem's experiments showed these biobots were able to traverse wounded human neuronal tissues and induce repair in those wounds in the course of three days. This is taking a major step in understanding interactions that can be used to correct any developmental defects at a level that occurs above just the cells, tissues, DNA, or organs. So they are looking at whole organisms and how they can interact with each other and aid each other. This is important because if they are able to understand and control these instructive cues, then they can use cells and tell them what to build and when to stop building and use them to fix defects and disease. So there is big potential of application future medicine.
