7 ms·

Team Builds the First Living Robots

87 points by jonbaer 7y ago

tudorw 7y ago
Rare that a headline is so worthy, these are novel living things that are not from nature. Quite an achievement, well done, I think, obviously terrifying and disturbing too, what could possibly go wrong...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
1e-9 7y ago
It seems they cut up frog embryos and stitched the pieces back together to move in a certain way through involuntary muscle contractions. Maybe I'm being shortsighted, but I have a hard time thinking of this as anything but a rather nauseating bit of Frankensteinian experimentation.
- blaeks 7y ago
  is current breakthrough this: "The big question in biology is to understand the algorithms that determine form and function," ?
- colordrops 7y ago
  How far removed would this have to be from an embryo for you to no longer have an emotional reaction? What if they only used proteins? Do you wear leather?
  - cmroanirgo 7y ago
    The article itself is claiming 'Living', which is to state that it is something more than a simple protein chain reaction. However to conflate what's been done here and compare it to wearing leather, just doesn't compute. I don't think anyone would reasonably compare a leather jacket to a Hannibal Lecter style 'skin suit'. I think the parent post's comment is very astute, as the article mentions how it's taking frog cells and passing electricity through them and calling it alive. How is that not Frankensteinian? It's kind of the definition of it. There is also the argument of making the assumption that there's an emotional reaction... Morals and ethics classes are taught in nearly all university degrees these days to try and highlight the issues around this stuff, and I think it unfair to bluntly force it into black and white. For some people it's a question of how deep into the murky quagmire one goes, whereas for others "it's just science" is completely sufficient. But, it's clear that the latter will never have complete approval, nor will the former ever have its way entirely. For me, I look at this experiment as such: Were any frogs killed in doing this experiment? If so, how is the destruction of a life-form comparable to making a laboratory made one? Do the two actually have the same 'life' in them? Philosophically speaking, I'd say not, and as such I call this experimentation a 'dark pattern' and should be avoided: no matter the perceived marketing benefit.
    - colordrops 7y ago
      I don't have a coherent theory on this subject. My questions were direct and not rhetorical, designed to spur discussion and provide more context and nuance, which you have. Thanks.
    - s1artibartfast 7y ago
      I'm curious what part of the experiment you find objectionable and why. Is it the destruction of a life-form? Is it the creation of a different life form? Why does it matter if they are equivalent?
  - 1e-9 7y ago
    For me, it would need to not involve the unjustified sacrifice of intelligent life. I believe this is a viewpoint that increases the longterm survival probability of humankind.
- taneq 7y ago
  Makes me think more of The Island of Dr Moreau (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_of_Doctor_Moreau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_of_Doctor_Moreau) but yeah. Sounds useful, but ghoulish.
- pavlov 7y ago
  “Cut up embryos and stitched back together” seems like an uncharitable description of a multi-stage microsurgical process where the starting point was only stem cells. This is the description from the article: ” Then the team at Tufts, led by Levin and with key work by microsurgeon Douglas Blackiston—transferred the in silico designs into life. First they gathered stem cells, harvested from the embryos of African frogs, the species Xenopus laevis. (Hence the name "xenobots.") These were separated into single cells and left to incubate. Then, using tiny forceps and an even tinier electrode, the cells were cut and joined under a microscope into a close approximation of the designs specified by the computer.”
  - 1e-9 7y ago
    > ...where the starting point was only stem cells. According to the article, the starting point was embryos. "Now a team of scientists has repurposed living cells—scraped from frog embryos—and assembled them into entirely new life-forms." I don't see much difference between "scraped" and "cut up"... perhaps a nuance of scale.
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      Because they didn't take "pieces" a la Frankenstein. Just single cells. If the stem cells had been harmlessly extracted from living frogs would you still use the same terms? The experiment itself would be 99% the same in that case, it would just have a more complicated resource gathering step.
      - 1e-9 7y ago
        The parts were skin cells and heart cells. I concede that they were very tiny parts. > If the stem cells had been harmlessly extracted from living frogs would you still use the same terms? That would be perfectly fine in my view. I have no qualms about using living tissue. It's the unnecessary sacrifice of intelligent life that I find objectionable.
        Dylan16807 7y ago
- fsloth 7y ago
  We can't really yet design organisms on a genetic level to fully control their phenotype. But if we would - and wanted to - something like this seems like a step to that direction. I'm not sure what you find nauseating about this. If you want muscle and skin cells frog embryos are as fine source as any, I suppose.
  - 1e-9 7y ago
    > If you want muscle and skin cells frog embryos are as fine source as any, I suppose. There's the issue. I prefer to see us pursue technologies that don't require the harvesting of parts from intelligent life, even if we deem that intelligence to be low or embryonic. Yes, I am aware that we are omnivores, but I believe we can make ourselves into something better. I see this kind of experimentation as a step backwards.
    - elfexec 7y ago
      > I prefer to see us pursue technologies that don't require the harvesting of parts from intelligent life, even if we deem that intelligence to be low or embryonic. How do you define "intelligent life"? If frogs and embryos are considered intelligent life, then you really are painting yourself into a corner. > Yes, I am aware that we are omnivores, but I believe we can make ourselves into something better. What's better than omnivores? Evolutionarily speaking, that's the best out there. Not sure we can do better, but I'd love to hear what you had in mind.
      - 1e-9 7y ago
        > How do you define "intelligent life"? Currently, my simplest definition is "any self-aware organism capable of predicting the future to some degree." > What's better than omnivores? Previous omnivores. I think we are rapidly getting to the point where we will be able to sustain ourselves effectively with non-animal foods in a way that will be more nutritious, more sustainable, and more environmentally friendly. I want humankind to prosper longterm and I think our most immediate challenge to that is our violence towards each other and towards our environment; either one of which may very well destroy us in the next 100 years. If the majority of us adopted a view that intelligent life at all levels should be protected, I believe that our violence towards each other and towards our environment will abate. I hope this will allow us to address the next major challenge, which I see as a mass extinction event similar to one of the many we see written in Earth's geological record. To overcome this, we will need to become more intelligent, we will need to dramatically advance our technologies, and we will probably need to populate other worlds. But first, we need to not destroy ourselves.
blaeks 7y ago
So, now I imagine a softy squishy and alive bed, breathing living room, and my wires, computers, keyboards, all that old pre-VR hardware finally floating in a living womb. Organic Internauting iz now.
- potta_coffee 7y ago
  Reminiscent of Dune, which had living "chairdogs".
  - satori99 7y ago
    Or Red Dwarf (novel); The trend spread. GELFs, Genetically Engineered Life Forms, were everywhere, and soon virtually every consumer product was made of living tissue. Gelf armchairs, which could sense your mood, and massage your shoulders when you were feeling tense, became a part of everyday life. Gelf vacuum cleaners, which were half kitchen appliance, half family pet, waddled around on their squat little legs, doing the household chores and amusing the children. [...] The rebellion started in the Austrian town of Salzburg, when a vacuum cleaner and Gelf Volkswagen Beetle robbed a high street bank. They took the manager and a security guard hostage, agreeing to release them only if Valter Holman was brought to justice for murder. Valter Holman had killed his armchair, and the whole of the Gelf community was up in arms, those that had arms, because the law courts refused to accept that a crime had been committed.
    - potta_coffee 7y ago
      Cool. My friend's mom was a huge Red Dwarf fan (tv show) but I didn't realize there was a novel. I'll have to check it out.
ohiovr 7y ago
H.R. Giger would dig it.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mattxxx 7y ago
Something about this is interesting: used an evolutionary algorithm to create thousands of candidate designs for the new life-forms Basically, "find a way to combine living tissue together to exhibit this behavior"... maybe the beginning of research into designing "meat compilers." x_x
- Hydraulix989 7y ago
  Essentially that’s how nature works, starting at the encoded amino acid level and building itself up to increasingly complex structures and life forms.
- type0 7y ago
  Needs to be huge amounts of military funding for "meat compilers" to create first ever Battletoad automatons.
- Accujack 7y ago
  Nah, genetic algorithms are quite well known, and have been taught in college courses since before 1990 or so. They're very useful for certain things, but they do take a lot of computing power to iterate on... they were once the domain of supercomputers (to produce usable models) but are now able to run on less expensive systems.
tyscorp 7y ago
Michael Levin gave a talk about the reprogramming tech used in this around a year ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg
29athrowaway 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo
- carapace 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_bacteriophage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_bacteriophage Blue goo.
shalasaska 7y ago
So when can I expect to be able to order myself my very own Pikachu?
darepublic 7y ago
Pretty incredible but could these be programmed to do harm?
- carapace 7y ago
  Sure. There are already efforts to create "Daleks" from human brain organoids.
fl0under 7y ago
Very interesting and exciting work. Michael Levin (one of the scientists in this study) has some amazing things going on in his lab. There is a few talks of him on YouTube, I have seen the following one from May this year https://youtu.be/4sFpJF0dp8Y https://youtu.be/4sFpJF0dp8Y All sorts of work about setting the electrical potential between cells/parts of the body to certain states to induce the desired growth. E.g. growing a eye on the gut of a tadpoles.
carapace 7y ago
Ah! The penny drops! Dr. Michael Levin hinted at these back in his amazing talk: "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" (youtube.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 This is the true Information Revolution: when we learn to "talk" to the four-billion-year-old nanotech that the world and we ourselves are made of.
jessaustin 7y ago
One is reminded of the Primordials from Twig. In that crapsack world, they were considered the most horrible things with which humanity could ever have the misfortune to coexist. Maybe it will work out better IRL!

87 points by jonbaer 7y ago

Rare that a headline is so worthy, these are novel living things that are not from nature. Quite an achievement, well done, I think, obviously terrifying and disturbing too, what could possibly go wrong...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

1e-9 7y ago

It seems they cut up frog embryos and stitched the pieces back together to move in a certain way through involuntary muscle contractions. Maybe I'm being shortsighted, but I have a hard time thinking of this as anything but a rather nauseating bit of Frankensteinian experimentation.

blaeks 7y ago
is current breakthrough this: "The big question in biology is to understand the algorithms that determine form and function," ?
colordrops 7y ago
How far removed would this have to be from an embryo for you to no longer have an emotional reaction? What if they only used proteins? Do you wear leather?
- cmroanirgo 7y ago
  The article itself is claiming 'Living', which is to state that it is something more than a simple protein chain reaction. However to conflate what's been done here and compare it to wearing leather, just doesn't compute. I don't think anyone would reasonably compare a leather jacket to a Hannibal Lecter style 'skin suit'. I think the parent post's comment is very astute, as the article mentions how it's taking frog cells and passing electricity through them and calling it alive. How is that not Frankensteinian? It's kind of the definition of it. There is also the argument of making the assumption that there's an emotional reaction... Morals and ethics classes are taught in nearly all university degrees these days to try and highlight the issues around this stuff, and I think it unfair to bluntly force it into black and white. For some people it's a question of how deep into the murky quagmire one goes, whereas for others "it's just science" is completely sufficient. But, it's clear that the latter will never have complete approval, nor will the former ever have its way entirely. For me, I look at this experiment as such: Were any frogs killed in doing this experiment? If so, how is the destruction of a life-form comparable to making a laboratory made one? Do the two actually have the same 'life' in them? Philosophically speaking, I'd say not, and as such I call this experimentation a 'dark pattern' and should be avoided: no matter the perceived marketing benefit.
  - colordrops 7y ago
    I don't have a coherent theory on this subject. My questions were direct and not rhetorical, designed to spur discussion and provide more context and nuance, which you have. Thanks.
  - s1artibartfast 7y ago
    I'm curious what part of the experiment you find objectionable and why. Is it the destruction of a life-form? Is it the creation of a different life form? Why does it matter if they are equivalent?
- 1e-9 7y ago
  For me, it would need to not involve the unjustified sacrifice of intelligent life. I believe this is a viewpoint that increases the longterm survival probability of humankind.
taneq 7y ago
Makes me think more of The Island of Dr Moreau (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_of_Doctor_Moreau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_of_Doctor_Moreau) but yeah. Sounds useful, but ghoulish.
pavlov 7y ago
“Cut up embryos and stitched back together” seems like an uncharitable description of a multi-stage microsurgical process where the starting point was only stem cells. This is the description from the article: ” Then the team at Tufts, led by Levin and with key work by microsurgeon Douglas Blackiston—transferred the in silico designs into life. First they gathered stem cells, harvested from the embryos of African frogs, the species Xenopus laevis. (Hence the name "xenobots.") These were separated into single cells and left to incubate. Then, using tiny forceps and an even tinier electrode, the cells were cut and joined under a microscope into a close approximation of the designs specified by the computer.”
- 1e-9 7y ago
  > ...where the starting point was only stem cells. According to the article, the starting point was embryos. "Now a team of scientists has repurposed living cells—scraped from frog embryos—and assembled them into entirely new life-forms." I don't see much difference between "scraped" and "cut up"... perhaps a nuance of scale.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    Because they didn't take "pieces" a la Frankenstein. Just single cells. If the stem cells had been harmlessly extracted from living frogs would you still use the same terms? The experiment itself would be 99% the same in that case, it would just have a more complicated resource gathering step.
    - 1e-9 7y ago
      The parts were skin cells and heart cells. I concede that they were very tiny parts. > If the stem cells had been harmlessly extracted from living frogs would you still use the same terms? That would be perfectly fine in my view. I have no qualms about using living tissue. It's the unnecessary sacrifice of intelligent life that I find objectionable.
      - Dylan16807 7y ago
fsloth 7y ago
We can't really yet design organisms on a genetic level to fully control their phenotype. But if we would - and wanted to - something like this seems like a step to that direction. I'm not sure what you find nauseating about this. If you want muscle and skin cells frog embryos are as fine source as any, I suppose.
- 1e-9 7y ago
  > If you want muscle and skin cells frog embryos are as fine source as any, I suppose. There's the issue. I prefer to see us pursue technologies that don't require the harvesting of parts from intelligent life, even if we deem that intelligence to be low or embryonic. Yes, I am aware that we are omnivores, but I believe we can make ourselves into something better. I see this kind of experimentation as a step backwards.
  - elfexec 7y ago
    > I prefer to see us pursue technologies that don't require the harvesting of parts from intelligent life, even if we deem that intelligence to be low or embryonic. How do you define "intelligent life"? If frogs and embryos are considered intelligent life, then you really are painting yourself into a corner. > Yes, I am aware that we are omnivores, but I believe we can make ourselves into something better. What's better than omnivores? Evolutionarily speaking, that's the best out there. Not sure we can do better, but I'd love to hear what you had in mind.
    - 1e-9 7y ago
      > How do you define "intelligent life"? Currently, my simplest definition is "any self-aware organism capable of predicting the future to some degree." > What's better than omnivores? Previous omnivores. I think we are rapidly getting to the point where we will be able to sustain ourselves effectively with non-animal foods in a way that will be more nutritious, more sustainable, and more environmentally friendly. I want humankind to prosper longterm and I think our most immediate challenge to that is our violence towards each other and towards our environment; either one of which may very well destroy us in the next 100 years. If the majority of us adopted a view that intelligent life at all levels should be protected, I believe that our violence towards each other and towards our environment will abate. I hope this will allow us to address the next major challenge, which I see as a mass extinction event similar to one of the many we see written in Earth's geological record. To overcome this, we will need to become more intelligent, we will need to dramatically advance our technologies, and we will probably need to populate other worlds. But first, we need to not destroy ourselves.

blaeks 7y ago

So, now I imagine a softy squishy and alive bed, breathing living room, and my wires, computers, keyboards, all that old pre-VR hardware finally floating in a living womb. Organic Internauting iz now.

potta_coffee 7y ago
Reminiscent of Dune, which had living "chairdogs".
- satori99 7y ago
  Or Red Dwarf (novel); The trend spread. GELFs, Genetically Engineered Life Forms, were everywhere, and soon virtually every consumer product was made of living tissue. Gelf armchairs, which could sense your mood, and massage your shoulders when you were feeling tense, became a part of everyday life. Gelf vacuum cleaners, which were half kitchen appliance, half family pet, waddled around on their squat little legs, doing the household chores and amusing the children. [...] The rebellion started in the Austrian town of Salzburg, when a vacuum cleaner and Gelf Volkswagen Beetle robbed a high street bank. They took the manager and a security guard hostage, agreeing to release them only if Valter Holman was brought to justice for murder. Valter Holman had killed his armchair, and the whole of the Gelf community was up in arms, those that had arms, because the law courts refused to accept that a crime had been committed.
  - potta_coffee 7y ago
    Cool. My friend's mom was a huge Red Dwarf fan (tv show) but I didn't realize there was a novel. I'll have to check it out.

ohiovr 7y ago

H.R. Giger would dig it.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mattxxx 7y ago

Something about this is interesting: used an evolutionary algorithm to create thousands of candidate designs for the new life-forms Basically, "find a way to combine living tissue together to exhibit this behavior"... maybe the beginning of research into designing "meat compilers." x_x

Hydraulix989 7y ago
Essentially that’s how nature works, starting at the encoded amino acid level and building itself up to increasingly complex structures and life forms.
type0 7y ago
Needs to be huge amounts of military funding for "meat compilers" to create first ever Battletoad automatons.
Accujack 7y ago
Nah, genetic algorithms are quite well known, and have been taught in college courses since before 1990 or so. They're very useful for certain things, but they do take a lot of computing power to iterate on... they were once the domain of supercomputers (to produce usable models) but are now able to run on less expensive systems.

tyscorp 7y ago

Michael Levin gave a talk about the reprogramming tech used in this around a year ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg

29athrowaway 7y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo

carapace 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_bacteriophage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_bacteriophage Blue goo.

shalasaska 7y ago

So when can I expect to be able to order myself my very own Pikachu?

darepublic 7y ago

Pretty incredible but could these be programmed to do harm?

carapace 7y ago
Sure. There are already efforts to create "Daleks" from human brain organoids.

fl0under 7y ago

Very interesting and exciting work. Michael Levin (one of the scientists in this study) has some amazing things going on in his lab. There is a few talks of him on YouTube, I have seen the following one from May this year https://youtu.be/4sFpJF0dp8Y https://youtu.be/4sFpJF0dp8Y All sorts of work about setting the electrical potential between cells/parts of the body to certain states to induce the desired growth. E.g. growing a eye on the gut of a tadpoles.

carapace 7y ago

Ah! The penny drops! Dr. Michael Levin hinted at these back in his amazing talk: "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" (youtube.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 This is the true Information Revolution: when we learn to "talk" to the four-billion-year-old nanotech that the world and we ourselves are made of.

jessaustin 7y ago

One is reminded of the Primordials from Twig. In that crapsack world, they were considered the most horrible things with which humanity could ever have the misfortune to coexist. Maybe it will work out better IRL!