Michael Levin spent his childhood, first in Moscow and then in Swampscott, Massachusetts, observing and musing about the miniature world of insects. Even then, he says, he was amazed that swarms of individuals could share common goals; his interest would later shift to how collections of living cells coordinate the building of complex anatomical structures. Levin enrolled at Tufts University, receiving two bachelor’s degrees, in computer science and biology, before completing a PhD in genetics at Harvard in 1996. His early work focused on how cells organize embryogenesis, and included the discovery of a new “bioelectric language” used by cells to coordinate their activities. Drawing on the parlance of computer science, Levin has been working on modifying these electrical signals—the physiological “software” that dictates body shape in animals—to induce cells to form new structures without making changes to a cell’s genome, what Levin calls the “hardware.”
Now, as a developmental ...
