For over a century, biology has centred genes and evolution in its explanations of behaviour. But synthetic biologist Michael Levin is creating new kinds of lifeform, known as biobots, which he argues challenge that picture. Built from unmodified frog and human cells, Levin’s biobots behave in ways that their genomes and evolutionary history fail to predict. In this interview, he tells the IAI’s Alasdair Craig that biology must do better. The solution, he thinks, may involve taking seriously the idea that biobots have minds, and that memory, learning and purposeful behaviour can exist far beyond the brain and its neurons.

Alasdair Craig: Could you give us a brief overview of what you’re aiming to do in regenerative medicine and cancer treatment?

Michael Levin: Imagine that you had a way of communicating goals, anatomical goals, to groups of cells, to ask them to build whatever structure you wanted them to build. Then birth defects, traumatic injury, degenerative disease, aging, cancer, all of these things could be solved. This is the major unsolved problem of regenerative medicine. So this is what we do in my group: we work on ways to communicate anatomical goals to groups of cells.