The Future World – A Conversation with Michael Levin

Michael Levin is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University, and associate faculty at Harvard’s Wyss Institute. He serves as the director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts (https://allencenter.ufts.edu/) and the co-director of the Institute for Computationally Designed Organisms at Tufts/UVM (https://icdorgs.org). He received dual B.S. degrees in computer science and biology, followed by a Ph.D. from Harvard with Clifford Tabin. He did post-doctoral training at Harvard School of Medicine in cell biology, and started his independent lab in 2000, developing the first molecular tools to read and write bioelectric prepatterns in non-neural tissue. The Levin lab studies the natural bioelectric gradients in tissue as the cognitive glue that holds together not only the neural Self but the somatic mind of the body.

His group at Tufts (https://drmichaellevin.org/) works to understand information processing and problem-solving across scales, in a range of naturally evolved, synthetically engineered, and hybrid living systems. They are interested in understanding how highly diverse minds are embodied in the physical world, and how cognition and intelligence scales and projects into new problems spaces. One of the model systems they use is morphogenesis during embryonic development and regeneration; by modeling this navigation of anatomical space as the behavior of a collective intelligence, they have developed novel applications in  organ regeneration, birth defects repair, cancer reprogramming, and the engineering of novel living proto-organisms. Using tools from behavioral, life, and computer sciences, Dr. Levin seeks to develop an empirically useful conceptual framework for identifying and ethically relating to a very wide range of possible minds. This work impacts regenerative medicine, AI, and bioengineering, as well as deep questions about the origin and future of natural and artificial intelligence. Dr. Levin’s science outreach is at https://www.youtube.com/@drmichaellevin/videos, and his personal thoughts on these questions are at https://thoughtforms.life/.