Nautilus is not one of our go-to sources for inspiration, but with conversations like this it is obvious we should be paying more attention to their work. Thanks to George Musser for this article:

The Biologist Blowing Our Minds

Michael Levin is uncovering the incredible, latent abilities of living things.

Michael Levin, a developmental biologist at Tufts University, has a knack for taking an unassuming organism and showing it’s capable of the darnedest things. He and his team once extracted skin cells from a frog embryo and cultivated them on their own. With no other cell types around, they were not “bullied,” as he put it, into forming skin tissue. Instead, they reassembled into a new organism of sorts, a “xenobot,” a coinage based on the Latin name of the frog species, Xenopus laevis. It zipped around like a paramecium in pond water. Sometimes it swept up loose skin cells and piled them until they formed their own xenobot—a type of self-replication. For Levin, it demonstrated how all living things have latent abilities. Having evolved to do one thing, they might do something completely different under the right circumstances.

Slime mold grows differently depending on the music playing.

Not long ago I met Levin at a workshop on science, technology, and Buddhism in Kathmandu. He hates flying but said this event was worth it. Even without the backdrop of the Himalayas, his scientific talk was one of the most captivating I’ve ever heard. Every slide introduced some bizarre new experiment. Butterflies retain memories from when they were caterpillars, even though their brains turned to mush in the chrysalis. Cut off the head and tail of a planarian, or flatworm, and it can grow two new heads; if you amputate again, the worm will regrow both heads. Levin argues the worm stores the new shape in its body as an electrical pattern. In fact, he thinks electrical signaling is pervasive in nature; it is not limited to neurons. Recently, Levin and colleagues found that some diseases might be cured by retraining the gene and protein networks as one might train a neural network. But when I sat down to talk to the audacious biologist on the hotel patio, I mostly wanted to hear about slime mold.

How did you come to cut up slime mold?

I was doing a home-school unit with my oldest son, and we wanted to understand what the slime mold Physarum does. It’s growing in a Petri dish of agar. It behaves by changing its shape. It crawls this way or that way. Also, it’s unicellular; the whole thing is one cell. No matter how big it is—it could be meters across—it’s one cell.

You’ve got a little treat, which is an oat flake, and it starts to grow toward the oat flake. Then you can take a razor blade and cut off the leading edge. After, you have two individuals: You have the big one, and you get the small one. Now, the small one has a choice to make. It can go get the food first, or it can go rejoin the rest of the Physarum and then go get the food. If it gets the food, it doesn’t have to share the food with this giant mass behind it. The nutrient density of that reward is huge.

With any kind of behaving organism, there is a calculus of payoff: If I do this, I win this much, and if I do that, I win that much. You have to make decisions. It’s always a trade-off of what are you going to do. People study this with game theory and things like the Prisoners’ Dilemma. You and I are competing and potentially cooperating over some resources. The number of players is constant. But the Physarum scenario is a kind of Prisoners’ Dilemma game where the number of players isn’t constant. Not only can you cooperate or defect, but you could also split and merge. How do you think about making decisions when the borders of your self are not fixed?

So what happened?

It preferred to first rejoin the rest…

Read the whole article here.