A Revolution in Biology - by Kasra - Bits of Wonder

Prelude: Michael Levin is a scientist at Tufts University who many have described as one of the most revolutionary biologists of our age. His work has been featured everywhere from Scientific American to the Lex Fridman podcast and The New Yorker. I spent the past month reading a bunch of his papers and interviews in an attempt to answer the question: what is Michael Levin on about and why does it matter? The essay below is the result of that investigation.

What are the biggest mysteries in science? When we ask this question we tend to talk about big picture topics like dark matter, consciousness, aliens, and parallel universes. We don’t talk as much about something that is more commonplace yet equally astonishing: how does the human body construct itself out of a single cell, like when a single fertilized egg cell develops into an embryo and ultimately into a fully-fledged adult?

We don’t tend to ask this question because we’re used to it—babies are born, acorns turn into trees, and eggs hatch into chickens every day. But there is indeed something perplexing about it. Think about what your cells have to do in the process of constructing your body: they have to coordinate their positions to follow a detailed architecture of bones, skin, muscles, and organs; they have to construct and wire together the hundred billion neurons of your brain; each cell has to decide what kind of cell to specialize into, and how much to duplicate to ensure all the proportions of your body parts are correct. How do so many individual units cooperate to self-assemble into a large, functional whole?

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