13 ms·

A Revolution in Biology?

298 points by pr337h4m 2y ago

prog_1 2y ago
levins work is great, except that afaik it hasnt been reproduced outside of his lab
webnrrd2k 2y ago
I'm about 55 now, and if I was high school or college age again, this is what I'd study. There is huge potential in future biological developments.
- monsieurbanana 2y ago
  What if you were 33? Asking for a, huh, friend.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    I'd get ready for the mid-life crisis.
    - knicholes 2y ago
      How?
      - throwup238 2y ago
        I believe the traditional approach is a Corvette you can't afford and a new partner that violates the half plus seven rule.
      - bee_rider 2y ago
        I think what I’ll do is get a hobby that is not too expensive. Like, you have to buy something overpriced to satisfy a midlife crisis, but at least I will try to get some nice headphones (not harmful at least, and with nice headphones you can play your music quieter, save your hearing) or a good bicycle (healthy!) out of it. Anything but a sports car, really. Driving around in a sports car is just advanced sitting, which I already do to much of, and they are very expensive.
        joshuahedlund 2y ago
        Huh. So that must subconciously be why I got into birdwatching at age 35 and am now slowly leveling up the purchase price of the binoculars…
        bee_rider 2y ago
        Another good one is keyboards. Maybe Warhammer?
        rnewme 2y ago
        Sports car does not need to be expensive. I think it's more about having a purpose and being useful rather than anything else. I saw it in me and other people I know that went through that period. The greater the thing you're working on the less you'll feel any change.
        webnrrd2k 2y ago
        Continuing with the dev bio theme, I'd suggest kicking off a mid-life crisis with a decent microscope, petri dishes, and maybe some planeria or something else to study.
  - f_allwein 2y ago
    By all means go back to university, even do a PhD, if you find a subject you’re passionate about (and have the beans to finance it). That’s what I did and it was great!
  - vladms 2y ago
    I find the probability of someone on the internet being able to give you sound advice, without knowing your situation and personality extremely small. For me personally it is most of the time about the balance between what you can afford, what would you think you would like to achieve and what you miss would. Reasonably, most of the people can't "have it all" (family, money, peace of mind, results, etc.).
  - theGnuMe 2y ago
    Well it’s not lucrative in the tech company sense but it is interesting science. It keeps the brain engaged. So less competition but a harder space if that makes sense. The larger breakthroughs will be driven by AI and new instruments. Biological understanding has always been about developing the right tool/instrument to answer a question.
danielmarkbruce 2y ago
It's surprising that the main thrust of this is surprising. Do biologists not tend to think about electromagnetic force and it's implications?
- newzisforsukas 2y ago
  They do but that doesn't lend to a hype topic for writing poorly about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_bioelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_bioelectricity
- olddustytrail 2y ago
  [flagged]
- spacetimeuser5 2y ago
  When in 18xx FDA or its precursor was being formed, its goal was to confine various "bioelectrical woo" present in medicine and biology at that time. And back then there was Rife's microscope, for example, which was able to accurately image living cells. Yet no-one tried to account for the cumulative damage/adverse effects done by FDA approved treatments in comparison with a potential or actual damage done by such "woo".
  - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
    Interesting. Thanks for the insight.
briffid 2y ago
The most interesting for me is the offspring, reproducing a different structure with the same genes. I think mathematically this could be the missing link in evolution, where random gene modifications are just not probable enough to drive evolution. 3 billion DNA pairs cannot evolve randomly, there is not enough time and matter in the universe to randomly try successful generations of life forms. However, bioelectric might be a much much more straightforward and fast way of driving evolution instead of randomly mutating DNA.
- exe34 2y ago
  > 3 billion DNA pairs cannot evolve randomly, there is not enough time and matter in the universe to randomly try successful generations of life forms the objection to the process described here is reasonable. thankfully this isn't how it works.
  - treprinum 2y ago
    > thankfully this isn't how it works. Care to elaborate what lowers this probability down to "computable within adolescent age" levels?
    - empath75 2y ago
      You want people to explain natural selection and evolution to you?
      - treprinum 2y ago
        No, I want the computational feasibility explanation with some nice O(function) on biological processes. To the best of my knowledge, we still have no idea. Something like "the computational complexity of a beached fish to invent and grow a leg is O(n^2 log n) hours where n is the number of neural spikes in frontal cortex" or similar.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
dang 2y ago
Related. Others? Computational Boundary of a Self: Bioelectricity and Scale-Free Cognition (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39244333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39244333 - Feb 2024 (1 comment) Brains are not required to think or solve problems – simple cells can do it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39127028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39127028 - Jan 2024 (396 comments) Bioelectricity, Biobots, and the Future of Biology [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38423588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38423588 - Nov 2023 (1 comment) How bioelectricity could regrow limbs and organs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38027587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38027587 - Oct 2023 (100 comments) M. Levin – Bioelectrical signals reveal, induce, and normalize cancer [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37140965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37140965 - Aug 2023 (1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36912245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36912245 (July 2023) Aging as a morphostasis defect: a developmental bioelectricity perspective - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36264719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36264719 - June 2023 (1 comment) Bioelectric networks: cognitive evolutionary scaling from physiology to mind - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36009513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36009513 - May 2023 (1 comment) Bioelectric networks: from body intelligence to regenerative medicine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35763121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35763121 - April 2023 (1 comment) Non-neural, developmental bioelectricity as a precursor for cognition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33902641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33902641 - Dec 2022 (1 comment) Michael Levin: Intelligence Beyond the Brain (networked daptive morphogenesis~) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33217070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33217070 - Oct 2022 (1 comment) Plasticity without genetic change – Michael Levin [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32119375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32119375 - July 2022 (1 comment) Mike Levin on using bioelectricity to study how cells form (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27819791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27819791 - July 2021 (21 comments) Persuading the Body to Regenerate Its Limbs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27062477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27062477 - May 2021 (69 comments) The Link Between Bioelectricity and Consciousness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435281 - March 2021 (1 comment) Growing Neural Cellular Automata: A Differentiable Model of Morphogenesis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22300376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22300376 - Feb 2020 (46 comments) What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 - Dec 2018 (16 comments) Brainless Embryos Suggest Bioelectricity Guides Growth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16589702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16589702 - March 2018 (35 comments) Memory in the Flesh: Can memories survive outside the brain? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9226391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9226391 - March 2015 (12 comments)
RivieraKid 2y ago
It's incredible that the information necessary to create a human is just about 750 MB uncompressed. For example the very specific shape of the scapula bone or fear of spiders...
- sameoldtune 2y ago
  To be fair that’s just the size of the installer
  - B1FF_PSUVM 2y ago
    That's a good comeback, especially if you can say something about the site where the rest of the info is pulled from ;-)
    - Angostura 2y ago
      Well, the egg’s cytoplasm contains quite a few of the frameworks
    - aspenmayer 2y ago
      DNA has been in development hell for billions of years, and yet compile/install times still vary widely between platforms and is not ABI compatible cross-platform. Don’t get me started on the unauthorized use of proprietary code! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer We keep getting asked about “checksums” and “reproducible builds” and if the BDFL is going to implement them, to which they say: “already landed in upstream,” “works on my machine,” “notabug,” and/or “wontfix” sometimes in the same reply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3730912/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3730912/ https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2016.106 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2016.106
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - sameoldtune 2y ago
robwwilliams 2y ago
Michael Levin is coming close to the positions of both Humberto Maturana (autopoiesis) and of Nick Lane (proton pumping). Autopoiesis is not an easy set of concepts but one of the ideas is that details of structure are much less important that preservation of relationships that allow an entity to replenish its own constituents. Planarian are damn adaptable, but this is hardly news. Nick Lane emphasizes that DNA is subsidiary to bioenergetics and “proton pumping” across membranes. His recent book “Transformer” focuses on the Kreb’s cycle and mitochondria as the crux of life (and autopoiesis, although he does not use this term). Lane is extremely readable. Maturana is almost inscrutable. I enjoined the target article, but am not comfortable boiling down development to “bioelectrics”. A complementary perspective but I do not think this will get us farther than good old developmental molecular biology.
- _zamorano_ 2y ago
  Lane has spoiled essay for me. I've read all his books and he's in the right place on the readability-complexity spectrum for my case. I can't find any other author, on any other field, I can learn so much from without being actual work.
- achillesheels 2y ago
  I disagree. An electromagnetic paradigm of cell life is critical to understanding predictive molecular dynamics, particularly where cellular neural recruitment is concerned. Moving passed mass and unto the mathematical perfection of electromagnetic radiation - as idealized as realized in the electrical engineering sciences - demonstrates its exaltedness in theoretical application.
LarsDu88 2y ago
The language in the article is a bit overhyped. There are multiple examples of gradients being involved in pattern formation. It's just that electrical potentials are a bit of a newer area of study. There's the chemical gradient based on WNT signaling in fruitfly development, the SHH (sonic hedgehog) chemical gradient in limb pattern formation and body planning asymmetry. There's even auxin signaling in plant development. Heck, one of Alan Turing's (yes, THAT Turing) most famous papers from the 50s described reaction-diffusion mechanisms for pattern formation. Basically for evolution to invent some kind of reproducible pattern of something, you need to start with a gradient of something and tie that to gene transcription. In the fruit fly example it's a chemical trigger that reaches the nucleus via wnt signaling. In the flatworm example, it's a membrane polarization gradient that drives the gradient rather than a chemical one. I'd imagine the patterns you can create from electrical depolarization are simpler than the ones you can get from chemicals interacting as you lose many of the interesting interactions you get from reaction-diffusion
- 100ideas 2y ago
  Ditto. The larger question is how does the linear sequence of DNA (primary sequence) ultimately drive the spatio-temporal development program that leads to mature differentiated cells working together at the organoid / organ / organism scale. How do cells know what to do in time and space as the organism grows? How is that logic encoded in the genome? Eric Davidson did a bunch of pioneering work meticulously "debugging" this spatiotemporal genomic logic in the sea urchin. Pretty amazing. Eukaryotes like us have control elements directly upstream of our genes (trans-acting aka close acting) and also 100,000's of base pairs distant (cis-acting). The region of DNA directly preceding the beginning of an open reading frame at the start of a gene usually has a sequence of DNA motifs that bind proteins that can increase or decrease expression of the gene. Davidson and others showed that the transcription factor proteins that bind to these control motifs actually have additional other proteins that bind to them, in literally a layer on top, and that the sequences of proteins in this second layer recruit a tertiary layer of proteins that conditionally cause more or less gene expression, depending on their identities. You could say the secondary and tertiary layers are a form of "abstraction" in a literal sense, since they encode a hierarchy of logical operations. Here's an open-access overview of Davidson's work which incidentally illuminates a lot of these concepts in more detail for a lay audience: "ERIC DAVIDSON: STEPS TO A GENE REGULATORY NETWORK FOR DEVELOPMENT" by Ellen Rothenberg, 2016; doi: 10.1016/j.ydbio.2016.01.020 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4828313/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4828313/ to see the decoded logic in pseudocode and with a diagram, see "cis-Regulatory control circuits in development", Howard and Davidson, 2004, Developmental Biology, vol 271, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ydbio.2004.03.031 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ydbio.2004.03.031 (open access)
spacetimeuser5 2y ago
With such apparent speed and quality of research thought we will never have anatomical compiler, let alone electroceutocals and anthrobots, on a routine basis at least in the next couple of hundreds of years.
jononomo 2y ago
As a biologist, how do you account for the existence of life?
- dang 2y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40627070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40627070.
- koeng 2y ago
  There was an RNA molecule or molecules that could make more of themselves (probably really poorly, at first)
  - jononomo 2y ago
    Have you read a book called The Stairway to Life: An Origin-of-Life Reality Check by Tan & Stadler? You can find it on Amazon. It's pretty short and will get you thinking rigorously about the problem.
    - koeng 2y ago
      No. But I feel like it is unlikely I'll find much value in it. Part 1 being on the Venter work does NOT inspire confidence at all. Not to dismiss them - they're great I've worked with them on a couple projects - but it frankly doesn't have anything to do with abiogenesis. The other fact that lots of creationists like it doesn't bode well either. Like, of COURSE the Venter cell looks too complicated to originate from raw chemicals! The lineage it evolved from was far more complex, and Mycoplasma underwent minimization. Minimal life also does not equal simple life, or life that was most probable to arise from chemicals. Just a stupid premise, really.
      - sho 2y ago
        [flagged]
        2y ago
dash2 2y ago
> They’ve done things like getting frogs to develop extra limbs, and getting them to develop an eye in their gut, or an eye in their tail that they can actually see out of. I have two contradictory reactions to this. 1. "Isn't science amazing!" 2. "Poor froggy, how horrible."
- fnordpiglet 2y ago
  Eye tails sound pretty awesome if you’re a frog tho.
fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
>the impact of Levin’s work is a shift away from genes as the only determinant of structure Nobody was making the claim that genes are the only determinant of structure though. A trivial example is the mother's hormones affecting her child's development in utero. To cause a shift away from genes would require showing that the bioelectric network is not itself caused by genetic factors. Otherwise while it may be useful as a tool to develop treatments for developmental diseases it does not change that genes are the ultimate cause of the bioelectric network itself (except as when directly manipulated by scientists). Quoting Levin himself: >Evolution was using bioelectric signaling long before neurons and muscles appeared, to solve the problem of creating and repairing complex bodies.[0] It sounds like to me from this quote that bioelectric networks are not something outside of genetics but just another important biological system. It's hard to pin down what the author is really getting at in the first place. For example these two lines: >genes are great, and they do contain much of the necessary information for building our bodies. But they don’t contain all of it >[...] >Levin’s point is that genes are like machine code, and modern-day programmers never think about machine code—they think about higher-level software constructs like objects, modules, and applications. Yet machine code really is what is being executed by the computer. Nobody would say that the computer is really running c++, for example, or that c++ is a new "determinant of structure" of the program. It is completely subsumed by machine code. The author is the entire time equating a set of instructions (the genome) to a biological system (the "bioelectric network"). However it does not make sense to equate these things in the way the author has done it (at least not without a lot more elaboration). The genes do not really do anything except get copied and transcribed into mRNA while the bioelectric network clearly is doing something. So it really seems more like the author should be comparing proteins with the bioelectric network. But I think here the problem becomes much more obvious – there is no other way besides proteins for biological organisms to do work. So it is obvious that the bioelectric network is somehow formed by the work of proteins, and the proteins are themselves caused by genes. The human body has within it many systems: the circulatory system, the respiratory system, the endocrine system, the nervous system, the muscular system etc. These all exist at "higher levels of abstraction" than genes and some of them, like the endocrine system, play a role in development. But it wouldn't make sense to say that these system are "in competition" with the genome. Even though we can use the circulatory system to transport a drug to the body that changes the structure of the body. Another major difference is that genetics are continually showing their influence because the body is continually creating proteins from the genome. It sounds from the article that this bioelectric network is really only relevant at the developmental stage (if I am wrong here then I feel the article should have made that more explicit). Ultimately I feel the article is arguing a bit against a strawman of "genes as the only determinant of structure" and is also making too vague of a claim about genes having a new competitor, so to speak. [0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-023-01780-3 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-023-01780-3
hcmgr 2y ago
website blocked in my country :(
lo_zamoyski 2y ago
The first observation is that DNA, on its own, is useless. It has no causal power. It doesn't generate or explain life or cells. You need an existing cell, an existing organism, to make use of the DNA, as it were. Of course, without DNA, the cell cannot proceed. So this mutual dependence tells you that they're a package deal, and neither can be reduced to the other. The second is that you really cannot get away from telos. The ostensible banishment of telos is not a scientific conclusion, but a metaphysical choice, and one that is incoherent. Telos isn't will or desire or planning or intent per se, though these are examples. Telos is what explains why an effect follows from a cause, and does so with regularity. That striking a match (efficient cause) results in fire (effect) is a question of telos, of the match being ordered toward the effect of fire, effected and actualized by striking. The match obviously is not planning to produce fire, it doesn't will it or want it. But it is causally ordered toward that end or effect. Otherwise, you could not explain why striking it actualizes this potential for fire. You could not make sense of any phenomena, why striking a match results in fire instead of, say, nothing or the appearance of an elephant or whatever. Biology is no different, but here we can speak of higher order telos. And as biology progresses, the more difficult it is to maintain the crude mechanistic view of life reaching back to the 17th century, that is, one modeled on the machine metaphor. Living things, strictly speaking, are not machines. They're integral wholes, not accidental arrangements.
- gus_massa 2y ago
  > The first observation is that DNA, on its own, is useless. Yep, that why https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world is so interesting.
mcswell 2y ago
Hidden in footnote 5 is a significant fact about the two-headed planaria (flatworms) that produce two-headed offspring: they reproduce not by laying eggs, but by fission. In other words, this physiological trait is not passed through the genes (if it were, that would be a rather astounding Lamarckian fact). Planaria in general reproduce sexually (with eggs and sperm) and asexually (by splitting).
- netcan 2y ago
  Isn't that Lamarckian either way?
kettleballroll 2y ago
As an aside > His work has been featured everywhere from Scientific American to the Lex Fridman podcast and The New Yorker. This is a weird way to posit someone's scientific achievements. Had they said eg Lancet, Nature and Science -- ok, clearly someone publishing in those venues is a scientific heavyweight. But being featured in pop-science, a famous podcast and a general audience magazine only tells me how well someone can explain/sell their research, but doesn't actually say anything about the strength of that research.
- pier25 2y ago
  Maybe because the target is the general audience.
koolala 2y ago
wearing a tail?
zer0gravity 2y ago
I have created a simulation of how a tree can be grown from a programmable cellular automata. Each cell executes some operations, including replication, based on the surrounding conditions and its age/iteration. More complex organisms can be grown with this technique. You can play too with it here: https://acionescu.github.io/digitalfire/WebContent/ https://acionescu.github.io/digitalfire/WebContent/
- bavell 2y ago
  Very very cool, bookmarked!
Anduia 2y ago
Really bad title. Here is a better one: Bioelectric Signals Guide Body Development and Regeneration
schappim 2y ago
This “Fractal Intelligence” stuff feels super Wolfram-like. Just as Wolfram argues that simple rules in cellular automata can create complex, intelligent patterns, Levin’s bioelectric networks show how cells and organs have their own built-in smarts and adaptability. Both are about how simple, foundational principles lead to sophisticated behaviour, challenging the old deterministic ways of thinking. It’s basically a fresh take on how complexity and intelligence arise, and could really shake up how we understand biology and systems in general.
- simiones 2y ago
  That doesn't inspire confidence in Levin's research, if it were true. Wolfram's quixotic quest for a theory of everything is something basically only he believes in, with very little shot at doing anything worthwhile, at least for physics. I hope that Levin's notions are more likely to bear some fruit.
pvaldes 2y ago
> studying cancer as a “dissociative identity disorder” of cell groups, > finding that ant colonies succumb to “visual illusions” > had created biobots from frog skin cells > and then created human biobots from lung tissue that can heal damaged neurons. Oh man, the entire article is a train wreck. Theranos level. I don't even know how to start. I wouldn't advise to put your money on this. Not without a lot of safety measures.
swamp40 2y ago
He used human tracheal cells, not lung cells. "Because they are one of the few tissues in the body that have motile cilia."[0] So they can move around. [0] https://twitter.com/drmichaellevin/status/1730428052847370556 https://twitter.com/drmichaellevin/status/173042805284737055...
fullstackchris 2y ago
Way out of my wheelhouse but after reading this it leads me to believe "heal machines" like in elysium and other scifi movies may not be that much scifi after all.... block an ion channel here, send a signal there... poof, your arm is back!

298 points by pr337h4m 2y ago

levins work is great, except that afaik it hasnt been reproduced outside of his lab

I'm about 55 now, and if I was high school or college age again, this is what I'd study. There is huge potential in future biological developments.

monsieurbanana 2y ago
What if you were 33? Asking for a, huh, friend.
- throwup238 2y ago
  I'd get ready for the mid-life crisis.
  - knicholes 2y ago
    How?
    - throwup238 2y ago
      I believe the traditional approach is a Corvette you can't afford and a new partner that violates the half plus seven rule.
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      I think what I’ll do is get a hobby that is not too expensive. Like, you have to buy something overpriced to satisfy a midlife crisis, but at least I will try to get some nice headphones (not harmful at least, and with nice headphones you can play your music quieter, save your hearing) or a good bicycle (healthy!) out of it. Anything but a sports car, really. Driving around in a sports car is just advanced sitting, which I already do to much of, and they are very expensive.
      - joshuahedlund 2y ago
        Huh. So that must subconciously be why I got into birdwatching at age 35 and am now slowly leveling up the purchase price of the binoculars…
        bee_rider 2y ago
        Another good one is keyboards. Maybe Warhammer?
      - rnewme 2y ago
        Sports car does not need to be expensive. I think it's more about having a purpose and being useful rather than anything else. I saw it in me and other people I know that went through that period. The greater the thing you're working on the less you'll feel any change.
      - webnrrd2k 2y ago
        Continuing with the dev bio theme, I'd suggest kicking off a mid-life crisis with a decent microscope, petri dishes, and maybe some planeria or something else to study.
- f_allwein 2y ago
  By all means go back to university, even do a PhD, if you find a subject you’re passionate about (and have the beans to finance it). That’s what I did and it was great!
- vladms 2y ago
  I find the probability of someone on the internet being able to give you sound advice, without knowing your situation and personality extremely small. For me personally it is most of the time about the balance between what you can afford, what would you think you would like to achieve and what you miss would. Reasonably, most of the people can't "have it all" (family, money, peace of mind, results, etc.).
- theGnuMe 2y ago
  Well it’s not lucrative in the tech company sense but it is interesting science. It keeps the brain engaged. So less competition but a harder space if that makes sense. The larger breakthroughs will be driven by AI and new instruments. Biological understanding has always been about developing the right tool/instrument to answer a question.

danielmarkbruce 2y ago

It's surprising that the main thrust of this is surprising. Do biologists not tend to think about electromagnetic force and it's implications?

newzisforsukas 2y ago
They do but that doesn't lend to a hype topic for writing poorly about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_bioelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_bioelectricity
olddustytrail 2y ago
[flagged]
spacetimeuser5 2y ago
When in 18xx FDA or its precursor was being formed, its goal was to confine various "bioelectrical woo" present in medicine and biology at that time. And back then there was Rife's microscope, for example, which was able to accurately image living cells. Yet no-one tried to account for the cumulative damage/adverse effects done by FDA approved treatments in comparison with a potential or actual damage done by such "woo".
- danielmarkbruce 2y ago
  Interesting. Thanks for the insight.

briffid 2y ago

The most interesting for me is the offspring, reproducing a different structure with the same genes. I think mathematically this could be the missing link in evolution, where random gene modifications are just not probable enough to drive evolution. 3 billion DNA pairs cannot evolve randomly, there is not enough time and matter in the universe to randomly try successful generations of life forms. However, bioelectric might be a much much more straightforward and fast way of driving evolution instead of randomly mutating DNA.

exe34 2y ago
> 3 billion DNA pairs cannot evolve randomly, there is not enough time and matter in the universe to randomly try successful generations of life forms the objection to the process described here is reasonable. thankfully this isn't how it works.
- treprinum 2y ago
  > thankfully this isn't how it works. Care to elaborate what lowers this probability down to "computable within adolescent age" levels?
  - empath75 2y ago
    You want people to explain natural selection and evolution to you?
    - treprinum 2y ago
      No, I want the computational feasibility explanation with some nice O(function) on biological processes. To the best of my knowledge, we still have no idea. Something like "the computational complexity of a beached fish to invent and grow a leg is O(n^2 log n) hours where n is the number of neural spikes in frontal cortex" or similar.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]

dang 2y ago

Related. Others? Computational Boundary of a Self: Bioelectricity and Scale-Free Cognition (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39244333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39244333 - Feb 2024 (1 comment) Brains are not required to think or solve problems – simple cells can do it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39127028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39127028 - Jan 2024 (396 comments) Bioelectricity, Biobots, and the Future of Biology [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38423588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38423588 - Nov 2023 (1 comment) How bioelectricity could regrow limbs and organs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38027587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38027587 - Oct 2023 (100 comments) M. Levin – Bioelectrical signals reveal, induce, and normalize cancer [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37140965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37140965 - Aug 2023 (1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36912245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36912245 (July 2023) Aging as a morphostasis defect: a developmental bioelectricity perspective - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36264719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36264719 - June 2023 (1 comment) Bioelectric networks: cognitive evolutionary scaling from physiology to mind - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36009513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36009513 - May 2023 (1 comment) Bioelectric networks: from body intelligence to regenerative medicine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35763121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35763121 - April 2023 (1 comment) Non-neural, developmental bioelectricity as a precursor for cognition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33902641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33902641 - Dec 2022 (1 comment) Michael Levin: Intelligence Beyond the Brain (networked daptive morphogenesis~) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33217070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33217070 - Oct 2022 (1 comment) Plasticity without genetic change – Michael Levin [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32119375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32119375 - July 2022 (1 comment) Mike Levin on using bioelectricity to study how cells form (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27819791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27819791 - July 2021 (21 comments) Persuading the Body to Regenerate Its Limbs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27062477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27062477 - May 2021 (69 comments) The Link Between Bioelectricity and Consciousness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435281 - March 2021 (1 comment) Growing Neural Cellular Automata: A Differentiable Model of Morphogenesis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22300376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22300376 - Feb 2020 (46 comments) What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 - Dec 2018 (16 comments) Brainless Embryos Suggest Bioelectricity Guides Growth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16589702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16589702 - March 2018 (35 comments) Memory in the Flesh: Can memories survive outside the brain? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9226391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9226391 - March 2015 (12 comments)

RivieraKid 2y ago

It's incredible that the information necessary to create a human is just about 750 MB uncompressed. For example the very specific shape of the scapula bone or fear of spiders...

sameoldtune 2y ago
To be fair that’s just the size of the installer
- B1FF_PSUVM 2y ago
  That's a good comeback, especially if you can say something about the site where the rest of the info is pulled from ;-)
  - Angostura 2y ago
    Well, the egg’s cytoplasm contains quite a few of the frameworks
  - aspenmayer 2y ago
    DNA has been in development hell for billions of years, and yet compile/install times still vary widely between platforms and is not ABI compatible cross-platform. Don’t get me started on the unauthorized use of proprietary code! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer We keep getting asked about “checksums” and “reproducible builds” and if the BDFL is going to implement them, to which they say: “already landed in upstream,” “works on my machine,” “notabug,” and/or “wontfix” sometimes in the same reply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3730912/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3730912/ https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2016.106 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2016.106
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - sameoldtune 2y ago

robwwilliams 2y ago

Michael Levin is coming close to the positions of both Humberto Maturana (autopoiesis) and of Nick Lane (proton pumping). Autopoiesis is not an easy set of concepts but one of the ideas is that details of structure are much less important that preservation of relationships that allow an entity to replenish its own constituents. Planarian are damn adaptable, but this is hardly news. Nick Lane emphasizes that DNA is subsidiary to bioenergetics and “proton pumping” across membranes. His recent book “Transformer” focuses on the Kreb’s cycle and mitochondria as the crux of life (and autopoiesis, although he does not use this term). Lane is extremely readable. Maturana is almost inscrutable. I enjoined the target article, but am not comfortable boiling down development to “bioelectrics”. A complementary perspective but I do not think this will get us farther than good old developmental molecular biology.

_zamorano_ 2y ago
Lane has spoiled essay for me. I've read all his books and he's in the right place on the readability-complexity spectrum for my case. I can't find any other author, on any other field, I can learn so much from without being actual work.
achillesheels 2y ago
I disagree. An electromagnetic paradigm of cell life is critical to understanding predictive molecular dynamics, particularly where cellular neural recruitment is concerned. Moving passed mass and unto the mathematical perfection of electromagnetic radiation - as idealized as realized in the electrical engineering sciences - demonstrates its exaltedness in theoretical application.

LarsDu88 2y ago

The language in the article is a bit overhyped. There are multiple examples of gradients being involved in pattern formation. It's just that electrical potentials are a bit of a newer area of study. There's the chemical gradient based on WNT signaling in fruitfly development, the SHH (sonic hedgehog) chemical gradient in limb pattern formation and body planning asymmetry. There's even auxin signaling in plant development. Heck, one of Alan Turing's (yes, THAT Turing) most famous papers from the 50s described reaction-diffusion mechanisms for pattern formation. Basically for evolution to invent some kind of reproducible pattern of something, you need to start with a gradient of something and tie that to gene transcription. In the fruit fly example it's a chemical trigger that reaches the nucleus via wnt signaling. In the flatworm example, it's a membrane polarization gradient that drives the gradient rather than a chemical one. I'd imagine the patterns you can create from electrical depolarization are simpler than the ones you can get from chemicals interacting as you lose many of the interesting interactions you get from reaction-diffusion

100ideas 2y ago
Ditto. The larger question is how does the linear sequence of DNA (primary sequence) ultimately drive the spatio-temporal development program that leads to mature differentiated cells working together at the organoid / organ / organism scale. How do cells know what to do in time and space as the organism grows? How is that logic encoded in the genome? Eric Davidson did a bunch of pioneering work meticulously "debugging" this spatiotemporal genomic logic in the sea urchin. Pretty amazing. Eukaryotes like us have control elements directly upstream of our genes (trans-acting aka close acting) and also 100,000's of base pairs distant (cis-acting). The region of DNA directly preceding the beginning of an open reading frame at the start of a gene usually has a sequence of DNA motifs that bind proteins that can increase or decrease expression of the gene. Davidson and others showed that the transcription factor proteins that bind to these control motifs actually have additional other proteins that bind to them, in literally a layer on top, and that the sequences of proteins in this second layer recruit a tertiary layer of proteins that conditionally cause more or less gene expression, depending on their identities. You could say the secondary and tertiary layers are a form of "abstraction" in a literal sense, since they encode a hierarchy of logical operations. Here's an open-access overview of Davidson's work which incidentally illuminates a lot of these concepts in more detail for a lay audience: "ERIC DAVIDSON: STEPS TO A GENE REGULATORY NETWORK FOR DEVELOPMENT" by Ellen Rothenberg, 2016; doi: 10.1016/j.ydbio.2016.01.020 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4828313/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4828313/ to see the decoded logic in pseudocode and with a diagram, see "cis-Regulatory control circuits in development", Howard and Davidson, 2004, Developmental Biology, vol 271, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ydbio.2004.03.031 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ydbio.2004.03.031 (open access)

spacetimeuser5 2y ago

With such apparent speed and quality of research thought we will never have anatomical compiler, let alone electroceutocals and anthrobots, on a routine basis at least in the next couple of hundreds of years.

jononomo 2y ago

As a biologist, how do you account for the existence of life?

dang 2y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40627070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40627070.
koeng 2y ago
There was an RNA molecule or molecules that could make more of themselves (probably really poorly, at first)
- jononomo 2y ago
  Have you read a book called The Stairway to Life: An Origin-of-Life Reality Check by Tan & Stadler? You can find it on Amazon. It's pretty short and will get you thinking rigorously about the problem.
  - koeng 2y ago
    No. But I feel like it is unlikely I'll find much value in it. Part 1 being on the Venter work does NOT inspire confidence at all. Not to dismiss them - they're great I've worked with them on a couple projects - but it frankly doesn't have anything to do with abiogenesis. The other fact that lots of creationists like it doesn't bode well either. Like, of COURSE the Venter cell looks too complicated to originate from raw chemicals! The lineage it evolved from was far more complex, and Mycoplasma underwent minimization. Minimal life also does not equal simple life, or life that was most probable to arise from chemicals. Just a stupid premise, really.
    - sho 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - 2y ago

dash2 2y ago

> They’ve done things like getting frogs to develop extra limbs, and getting them to develop an eye in their gut, or an eye in their tail that they can actually see out of. I have two contradictory reactions to this. 1. "Isn't science amazing!" 2. "Poor froggy, how horrible."

fnordpiglet 2y ago
Eye tails sound pretty awesome if you’re a frog tho.

fngjdflmdflg 2y ago

>the impact of Levin’s work is a shift away from genes as the only determinant of structure Nobody was making the claim that genes are the only determinant of structure though. A trivial example is the mother's hormones affecting her child's development in utero. To cause a shift away from genes would require showing that the bioelectric network is not itself caused by genetic factors. Otherwise while it may be useful as a tool to develop treatments for developmental diseases it does not change that genes are the ultimate cause of the bioelectric network itself (except as when directly manipulated by scientists). Quoting Levin himself: >Evolution was using bioelectric signaling long before neurons and muscles appeared, to solve the problem of creating and repairing complex bodies.[0] It sounds like to me from this quote that bioelectric networks are not something outside of genetics but just another important biological system. It's hard to pin down what the author is really getting at in the first place. For example these two lines: >genes are great, and they do contain much of the necessary information for building our bodies. But they don’t contain all of it >[...] >Levin’s point is that genes are like machine code, and modern-day programmers never think about machine code—they think about higher-level software constructs like objects, modules, and applications. Yet machine code really is what is being executed by the computer. Nobody would say that the computer is really running c++, for example, or that c++ is a new "determinant of structure" of the program. It is completely subsumed by machine code. The author is the entire time equating a set of instructions (the genome) to a biological system (the "bioelectric network"). However it does not make sense to equate these things in the way the author has done it (at least not without a lot more elaboration). The genes do not really do anything except get copied and transcribed into mRNA while the bioelectric network clearly is doing something. So it really seems more like the author should be comparing proteins with the bioelectric network. But I think here the problem becomes much more obvious – there is no other way besides proteins for biological organisms to do work. So it is obvious that the bioelectric network is somehow formed by the work of proteins, and the proteins are themselves caused by genes. The human body has within it many systems: the circulatory system, the respiratory system, the endocrine system, the nervous system, the muscular system etc. These all exist at "higher levels of abstraction" than genes and some of them, like the endocrine system, play a role in development. But it wouldn't make sense to say that these system are "in competition" with the genome. Even though we can use the circulatory system to transport a drug to the body that changes the structure of the body. Another major difference is that genetics are continually showing their influence because the body is continually creating proteins from the genome. It sounds from the article that this bioelectric network is really only relevant at the developmental stage (if I am wrong here then I feel the article should have made that more explicit). Ultimately I feel the article is arguing a bit against a strawman of "genes as the only determinant of structure" and is also making too vague of a claim about genes having a new competitor, so to speak. [0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-023-01780-3 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-023-01780-3

hcmgr 2y ago

website blocked in my country :(

lo_zamoyski 2y ago

The first observation is that DNA, on its own, is useless. It has no causal power. It doesn't generate or explain life or cells. You need an existing cell, an existing organism, to make use of the DNA, as it were. Of course, without DNA, the cell cannot proceed. So this mutual dependence tells you that they're a package deal, and neither can be reduced to the other. The second is that you really cannot get away from telos. The ostensible banishment of telos is not a scientific conclusion, but a metaphysical choice, and one that is incoherent. Telos isn't will or desire or planning or intent per se, though these are examples. Telos is what explains why an effect follows from a cause, and does so with regularity. That striking a match (efficient cause) results in fire (effect) is a question of telos, of the match being ordered toward the effect of fire, effected and actualized by striking. The match obviously is not planning to produce fire, it doesn't will it or want it. But it is causally ordered toward that end or effect. Otherwise, you could not explain why striking it actualizes this potential for fire. You could not make sense of any phenomena, why striking a match results in fire instead of, say, nothing or the appearance of an elephant or whatever. Biology is no different, but here we can speak of higher order telos. And as biology progresses, the more difficult it is to maintain the crude mechanistic view of life reaching back to the 17th century, that is, one modeled on the machine metaphor. Living things, strictly speaking, are not machines. They're integral wholes, not accidental arrangements.

gus_massa 2y ago
> The first observation is that DNA, on its own, is useless. Yep, that why https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world is so interesting.

mcswell 2y ago

Hidden in footnote 5 is a significant fact about the two-headed planaria (flatworms) that produce two-headed offspring: they reproduce not by laying eggs, but by fission. In other words, this physiological trait is not passed through the genes (if it were, that would be a rather astounding Lamarckian fact). Planaria in general reproduce sexually (with eggs and sperm) and asexually (by splitting).

netcan 2y ago
Isn't that Lamarckian either way?

kettleballroll 2y ago

As an aside > His work has been featured everywhere from Scientific American to the Lex Fridman podcast and The New Yorker. This is a weird way to posit someone's scientific achievements. Had they said eg Lancet, Nature and Science -- ok, clearly someone publishing in those venues is a scientific heavyweight. But being featured in pop-science, a famous podcast and a general audience magazine only tells me how well someone can explain/sell their research, but doesn't actually say anything about the strength of that research.

pier25 2y ago
Maybe because the target is the general audience.

koolala 2y ago

wearing a tail?

zer0gravity 2y ago

I have created a simulation of how a tree can be grown from a programmable cellular automata. Each cell executes some operations, including replication, based on the surrounding conditions and its age/iteration. More complex organisms can be grown with this technique. You can play too with it here: https://acionescu.github.io/digitalfire/WebContent/ https://acionescu.github.io/digitalfire/WebContent/

bavell 2y ago
Very very cool, bookmarked!

Anduia 2y ago

Really bad title. Here is a better one: Bioelectric Signals Guide Body Development and Regeneration

schappim 2y ago

This “Fractal Intelligence” stuff feels super Wolfram-like. Just as Wolfram argues that simple rules in cellular automata can create complex, intelligent patterns, Levin’s bioelectric networks show how cells and organs have their own built-in smarts and adaptability. Both are about how simple, foundational principles lead to sophisticated behaviour, challenging the old deterministic ways of thinking. It’s basically a fresh take on how complexity and intelligence arise, and could really shake up how we understand biology and systems in general.

simiones 2y ago
That doesn't inspire confidence in Levin's research, if it were true. Wolfram's quixotic quest for a theory of everything is something basically only he believes in, with very little shot at doing anything worthwhile, at least for physics. I hope that Levin's notions are more likely to bear some fruit.

pvaldes 2y ago

> studying cancer as a “dissociative identity disorder” of cell groups, > finding that ant colonies succumb to “visual illusions” > had created biobots from frog skin cells > and then created human biobots from lung tissue that can heal damaged neurons. Oh man, the entire article is a train wreck. Theranos level. I don't even know how to start. I wouldn't advise to put your money on this. Not without a lot of safety measures.

swamp40 2y ago

He used human tracheal cells, not lung cells. "Because they are one of the few tissues in the body that have motile cilia."[0] So they can move around. [0] https://twitter.com/drmichaellevin/status/1730428052847370556 https://twitter.com/drmichaellevin/status/173042805284737055...

fullstackchris 2y ago

Way out of my wheelhouse but after reading this it leads me to believe "heal machines" like in elysium and other scifi movies may not be that much scifi after all.... block an ion channel here, send a signal there... poof, your arm is back!