There's a fascinating (in my opinion) TED talk about this featuring the same Biologist, with examples of regenerative experiments performed using Flatworms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XheAMrS8Q1c
This technology doesn't seem to be limited to existing limbs and organs. After replacing a missing arm you could add a third arm. A man could grow a uterus since he has the X chromosomes and with a transplant that includes Y chromosomes, a woman could grow testes. Parthenogenesis could become a choice. Another head seems possible. The limits are more likely to come from regulation than a reluctance of people to transform themselves.
Biological systems have an incredible plasticity. That same Michael Levin once used his discoveries to make a tadpole with an eye somewhere near the gut. The eye formed correctly and grew a nerve that connected to the spinal cord. The tadpole was able to see out of that eye. It's definitely a non-stock configuration yet it worked. I'm sure it's much more complicated than having 4 arms.
The problem isn't (just) the brain power, the shoulder joint is also a necessary component of the full range of motion and degrees of freedom your arm has. You can't just slot a ball and socket somewhere into the side of your ribs (and all the supporting musculature) and have it work the same way.
Almost certainly wouldn't be an issue. There's a huge amount of plasticity in embodiment. Think about how easily we can control videogame avatars of many physical forms, or adapt ourselves to a musical instrument, or even learn 'pilot' an artificial limb.
Conjoined twins Abby and Brittany Hensel look fairly normal apart from the two heads, but are really one-armed amputees each (but they were born with four arms and two heads): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJN2sauvEb0
Our brains can learn to handle new limbs - experiments with sensors that detect nerve impulses and control robotic arms have proven that.
Our brains can learn to handle new senses - experiments with sonar or infrared being sent to panels of pins that push on someone's arm have proven that.
I once spend a ( drunken ) evening discussing with a neurosurgeon about the possibility to add a prosthetic tail to the human body.
The base structures to control a tail are present in our brain, sure we lost it a few million years ago but still a tail is much more realistic than e.g a second pair of arms.
Well, I don’t know if it’s the brain power or the gray matter pruning that goes on, but my wife was an absolute space cadet for a while during pregnancy and quite a while after. She’d forget almost everything.
I've read literature that the hormone fluctuations resulting from pregnancy, and from parenting regardless of sex actually trigger the destruction of particular parts of the brain in humans.
This is a long shot, but I've always wondered if it might be genetically related to the part of the brain responsible for "abandon one of the babies to escape predator" type reasoning that you see in animals with litters. Something that would have been selected out of human evolution fairly quickly.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. We have mirrored nerve bundles dedicated to limbs with specific junctioning in the CNS. I don’t think it’s just brain plasticity at play, it’s fundamental wiring structure from limb to brain as well.
I think that's wildly over-optimistic: We have plenty of problems with existing limbs when it comes to fixing nerve-damage and then re-training everything. That's also with the advantage of decades of active prior use and in places/amounts that are supported by ten millions years of evolved physiological prep.
Male monkeys of some species are born colorblind. Researchers used viral gene therapy to add the other rhodopsin shapes for the other colors and they learned to process the new info in less than two weeks. Brains are amazingly plastic, but they are finite, something else would maybe have to go.
Indeed. I've been hearing about teeth being grown in vitro or regrown in vivo in various different trials for about 23 years now. Most recent is still saying "perhaps in ten years…"
I think it was partly that you have to be quite well-read in sci-fi to know where the names for the tech, buildings, victory conditions etc. come from, so most people don't get an easy anchor to remember what benefits they're likely to get from their choices.
Probably also didn't help that the first version had a very anti-climactic victory sequence; they improved it, but I do remember it being jarringly sudden the first time I played.
I'm a massive Science Fiction buff and bought the game, played it for a few hours and decided it was not for me. I think it's because I couldn't relate to the factions, if that makes sense.
The curious thing about Michael Levin's work is that they figured out "top level abstractions" in bioelectricity that tell the body to figure out everything, including the proper wiring. The have grown eyes in the wrong places that figure out how to connect to the brain, and even two heads.
These guys are decoding the actual bioelectrical code that governs morphogenesis, in a way that you don't need to micromanage anything, you just say "grow an eye" and the cells figure out the rest.
It doesn't work like that at all. Your brain's already plastic enough to be able to (quickly) accept new sensory input if you were given a new sense via prosthetic. Being able to twiddle your third thumb after it grows would be automatic.
One sex could decide it no longer wants to deal with anyone not of their sex and wipe them out. Humanity could go on with the artificially created sex organs. Lots of possibilities, not all of them the fun, wild and crazy anything goes utopia some are looking for.
Now there's a future society you don't see written about: a standard part of a marriage is the partners exchange immune-compatibilized gonads with their genetic material, so if one partner dies the other still retains the ability to grow viable off-spring from the pairing.
For people interesting into structural/mathematical underpinnings of living tissue, his videos demonstrated some strange iterated/algorithmic patterns.
For instance, re-grafting an eye slightly shifted, will mess with the regeneration system, and will lead to a ladder of smaller and smaller eyes appearing. As if being out of balance geometrically caused a rippling effect (like a terminal resizing)
Yeah, AFAIK Becker's "The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life" is pretty much all there was until Michael Levin came along and picked up the torch.
IMO it's one of those weird "holes": why so little interest in human tissue regeneration?
Because there’s no immediate and clear plan for a return on the investment due to how speculative things are, private funding is scant. Because we (the USA) are spending most of our money on the insane military complex there is little extra public funding for actually beneficial R&D.
The number you’re using is deceptive. You’re citing the Dept. of Defense’s (mandatory) budget, as if that is all the funding that goes to the military. It is not. After mandatory spending (DoD mandatory funds that you cite, social security, medicare, Medicare, interest…) about 25% of the budget is left for discretionary spending… BUT, nearly half of discretionary spending is government wages that, surprise surprise, includes military salaries and benefits. Then, a huge portion of the remaining discretionary funds are again allotted to the various military branches and war spending. Discretionary spending more than doubles the actual amount we put towards the military.
DARPA’s budget was slightly under $4B in 2022 — an order of magnitude smaller than the NIH.
My original comparison was because Medicare and the DOD have their own funding authorities and I didn’t want to sift through their budgets to find it all.
>Because we (the USA) are spending most of our money on the insane military complex there is little extra public funding for actually beneficial R&D
This simply isn't true at all. The US doesn't spend that much money on the military compared to other countries. Go look at federal expenditures; most are for entitlements: social security, medicare, etc.
As a percentage of GDP, US expenditure on the military is nothing unusual, and even a little low compared to many countries like Israel, Russia, probably Saudi Arabia, etc. It only seems huge because the US is huge, and has an enormous GDP, so of course it can afford to spend a lot more than a country like Italy for instance.
As the sibling comment said, look at how much the US spends for healthcare (not just federal expenditures, but total spent in the economy), and then ask why the US gets so little for its money there.
The problem in the US isn't spending money, it's how the money is spent and where it goes. Most of it seems to go into a black hole. Just look at how expensive it is to build anything.
--My question as well. Am I missing a published date on this podcast? It’s my first time seeing their content. This isn’t their latest episode and I am wondering how recent it is.--
Edit: it’s from April 27, 2023. I did miss it. Says it on the linked page
You know, at first I thought this was a load of wank but thinking about it, it does make sense that electricity is used for signalling everything. How does the brain wire itself up? How do cells figure out what to attach to? There must be some sort of mechanism for them to locally communicate.
So if you could give them the signal to reproduce and then signal them to form a structure, it's plausible they would be able to rebuild something.
I (and many others, I’m sure) had the pleasure of listening to him on the Lex Friedman podcast. I’ve listened to that episode three times, I really enjoy it. Not only did he discuss his research, but he also dips into the philosophical domain - connecting electromagnetic communication between cells to philosophy of the mind and the self. I don’t know what that itch is, be he scratched it.
- very patient
- much older than it appear (his research is already on trial in the lab maybe :)
- has found the way to make days longer than 24h, he's on 1330 podcasts a week
...how bioelectricity provides the blueprint for how our bodies are built—and how it could be the future of regenerative medicine.
DNA is the blueprint for how the body builds itself. I wish them well in exploring this and figuring out how to more effectively foster advanced healing of serious damage, but the body already has this info.
/2 cents from a person who no longer has a hole in her lung
So now the scientific community accepts chi. About time. The reality of bioenergy is obvious to anyone who's practiced chi kung or experienced their chakras.
We're seeing how the west is discovering those "chakras" and unlike the east, where the understanding of this topic is very broad and fuzzy, due to lack of experience in most cases, the west will develop a very narrow, but very sharp knowledge. Pair that with the thick dark cloud of nihilism enveloping the west today, and it's not hard to see where this will end up. Levin seems to have discovered what the east calls "etheric double" - a sort of living blueprint that guides the construction of any organic lifeform. That blueprint is of magnetic nature, and although it's not quite the same thing that flows in our copper wires, it easily interacts with the type of magnets at our disposal. From this point the discovery of inflow and outflow sinks of that "bioelectricity" is near.
It's well captured in the Feynman's quote: "shut up and calculate". When a typical western scientist sees a flatworm regrowing itself from pieces, his mind thinks of the mechanics of this process and little else. Someone with the eastern mindset is going to think about lots of fuzzy abstractions, such as the nature of lifeforce, but will not bother with boring details.
If you believe chi to be some kind of pseudoscience rather than something easily experienced you're in no position to tell us how it relates to what's being discussed here, as you demonstrate your ignorance.
Protoscience or a mix of abductive and inductive reasoning should not be entirely dismissed because it is not yet deductible. Often the process of "knowing" and developing axiomatic systems comes from first unknowing and grasping, and that doesn't even get into the incompleteness of axiomatic systems. We are refiners, we refine; your diamonds come from the dirt and are the next diamond's dirt.
